FEAR
Fear is one of my most intense emotions. Pain is the way my body tells me that something is wrong and protects me. Fear is my way of sensing things that threaten my well being or my identity. I feel fear bordering on paranoia. Someone only needs to say a code word such as academic standards or academic integrity and I sense that they are threat, not a huge threat, but something to watch out for. That is because I taught in an unconventional way and was always vulnerable to being accused of slighting academic standards. But in order to do the academic things that would have gained me approval I would have had to give up feeling my way along in class through an exploration of feelings in a way that made me feel most alive and worked for some students, but not the students dedicated to covering the material or to competitive learning. That is just one of my past fears, one of the places where I have sensed vulnerabilty and a threat to my identity.
But there are so many other red flags and ways that I sense I am vulnerable. Call me paranoid. The irony of my life as a privileged white male in a country with high living standards and great power reminds me daily that I am a hypocrite. The things I say I believe in, I don’t act on. People who point that out to me or accuse me of being a hypocrite are a threat.
I could go on and on. I have prejudices of every kind, unchosen and unwanted prejudices, in the presence of almost every kind of person: Fundamentalist Christians, Jews, Catholics, Blacks, fat peole (of which I am one), old white men (of which I am one), even bearded men (of which I am one). I don’t know where these prejudices came from and I hide them pretty well, but there they are. I am even ashamed of them, but that doesn’t protect me. Prejudice comes, I think, from deep protective fears, often imagined and baseless like my fear of the dark. So fear is an internal tension that I have to wrestle with daily.
But beyond myself I live in a country that is paranoid with fear, polarized by fear. We spend much more on the military than any other country but keep adding to it out of fear of terrorists or of perceived threats all around the world, defending ourselves in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq and losing in spite of our great power. But right now this fear seems best represented by guns.
Guns can be used for hunting and feeding ourselves, they can be collected as being beautiful well made objects, they can be used for the pleasure of trying to hit a bullseye, they can be erotic objects and can give a sense of power. I am including some photographs from a Twitter post of people who love guns for the above reasons. All of these people look like good people with strong American traditional family values.
But the fight over guns isn’t over those things, it is a fight, I think, over fear. On one side are mostly traditional rural people who feel that their guns and their Bible are the two things they would last surrender. Guns are a protection against anyone who threatens their fundamentalist religious values and their patriotic identity. They are the last defense of the home against threats of any kind.
And on the other side are people who are afraid of guns, particularly of assault weapons whose only function is to pulverize people, to decimate perceived threats. Millions of school children live in fear of being murdered by an assault weapon and are reminded of their fear by continual practice lockdowns. Millions of women are afraid that their children won’t come home safely from school. There is fear of a stranger at the door, fear of being blown away by road rage, fear of a loved one killing themselves, fear of mass killings of any kind, fear of a child being killed playing with a gun with friends.
The first group, often in thinly populated states with two senators giving them outsize power, find any restriction at all to gun sales to be a threat to the guns they are using to protect themselves. The second group sees a country awash in guns that anyone with a grudge can use as being the real threat. They see unrestricted gun access as a kind of madness. What both sides have in common is that they are driven by fear a fear that stems from all kinds of values—abortion, contraception, welfare, immigration, secularism, multiculturalism—all of which are a threat to one side or another and cause us to fear each other. Guns represent either a way to protect ourselves or, on the other side, as one of the greatest threats to our safety.
No one seems to have a solution. My rambling is more to center myself and figure out for myself what is going on than to find a solution. One more voice in the wilderness.
My only personal solutions are to find some way to deal with my own fear and paranoia. The first possible way for me is to simply accept that I live in a country with cultural norms that ensure that guns are freely available to anyone who wants to use them and therefore to accept the fact that there will be mass murders every week or two as a normal event. This is my land and I must accept it.
The second is close to this. There may be a mass shooting every week and individual shootings daily, but this is a huge country and the chance of me or the people I love being shot is very low. It is higher in Texas, and lower in North Carolina but statistically low in either place. It was very, very low in Uvalde until it wasn’t. I shouldn’t fear being shot any more than I should live in fear of lightning or being killed in a traffic accident, both or which are remote possibilities.
But the problem with both of these solutions is that they don’t solve the problem at all. The problem is fear on both sides. These solutions are almost a way of keeping my eyes closed.
The only solution that I can see is the solution that Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, William Barber preach and live. It is accepting each other as humans and listening to each other’s fears and trying to find a way out of fear through understanding and acceptance (love). This might come slowly, slowly over time through the ballot box if we trust in democracy. Acceptance and listening is lived out in small ways by people all across America. But it is very hard to do and you make yourself vulnerable in the process. But I can only point to it since I contribute almost nothing myself.
Photos from a Twitter feed AmeriGuns. https://twitter.com/Johnson__joey/status/1530499953944055814
So that is my brief sermon of the day for what it is worth.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 