To Be, Or Not To Be...Afraid

If I get a scary medical diagnosis, I focus on dealing with the problem, but I admit it makes me nervous. Same thing if someone I love is threatened by betrayal of mind or body. Otherwise, I don’t worry much.

Lately, with society at a low boil in a shallow pan, I think I should worry more. I read the cautionary tales, I study the uncivil behavior that in another time might have been unthinkable, and I express concern, but I think it more than feel it. 

I just seem to have a hard time believing the worst is going to happen.

Why is that? Lord knows. The worst has happened plenty of times, over and over again. Wars, genocides, mass shootings—of children, for gods sake. Maybe it’s my own lack of proximity to those tragedies that has left me sanguine. No enemy has invaded my country. I missed Vietnam, without even having to go lame with a bone spur. I’ve never been close to an active shooter.

Even though I know about them, it’s hard to imagine those things happening to me. Is that a failure of imagination, or is it a form of psychological armor that keeps me going forward and not hunkering down in a defensive crouch?

If it’s the latter, as I’m sure it is, at what point will it deceive me into believing that I am safer than I am? Why would it do that, anyway? Surely that’s not evolutionarily adaptive.

Or, perhaps it is. Life can’t go on if we are cowering in fear. Chores don’t get done, food doesn’t get put on the table. Paralyzing fear is just that…paralyzing.

There is a difference between acute danger and chronic threat. We all respond pretty well, and quickly, to acute danger. Fire in the kitchen, for instance. We’re slower to deal with chronic threats. Climate change is a good example. Is it real? we ask. What could I do about it, anyway? 

That kind of thinking lets us off the hook and permits us to go back to daily life, where dishes piling up in the sink are a more acute problem than an ambiguous threat that the planet is warming. Or that Donald Trump is going to tear down our democracy. 

Weather cycles and politicians come and go, we tell ourselves. Neither has destroyed us yet, at least not our own politicians. It’s easy to become complacent.

Then one day the tornado touches down on our home and it’s gone. After the next election, the mob doesn’t just put their feet up on the Speaker’s desk, they burn down the Capitol.

What then? 

We’d likely wander around in shock that the unimaginable happened and then try to put the pieces back together and get on with life, even if that meant starting over. We’re good at starting over. That's an adaptive trait.

How much better not to have to lay a new foundation for our home. How much better not to lose all we treasure.

We know how to avoid those calamities, even though we have distracted ourselves with our infighting to the point that we seem to have forgotten what the long history of civilization has taught us.

We have to build storm cellars, and we have to pay attention to the character of the men and women to whom we entrust the sacred job of protecting us and providing for our welfare. 

That job is not about retribution. It is about sober planning and an old-fashioned sense of responsibility to one another. It is grounded in a recognition that we are all in this together, and that fighting like pit bulls who have been tormented to the point that they only experience rage is only going to leave us bloodied and weak.

People Get Ready, A Train's A'Coming

I have become a prepper. 

The disaster I’m preparing for is a natural one, a storm of human nature. I see it forming on the horizon, a black funnel cloud sucking into its vortex fences that used to give neighbors a sense of their own place and safety.

I’ve never worried much about threats I couldn’t control. Partly that was because I was too busy with work and family, partly it was because I’m an optimist. It’s hard for me to think a disaster is about to befall us, especially since in my lifetime, although we’ve had some bad storms, we’ve always come out of the storm cellar not only alive but also chastened by the savagery of the world we live in, even more wary of its dangers, even more determined no to let them destroy us.

This time, I’m less sanguine.

I now believe there is a non-trivial chance Donald Trump will be our next president.

That’s the disaster I’m prepping for.

In his first term Trump was a wanna-be-dictator who created chaos in domestic and world affairs that caused significant but not irreparable damage. This time he may well succeed in becoming an actual dictator. 

We all know the risks: martial law, jailed enemies, suspended civil rights. General Milley wont be there to stop him from using the military as his personal police force, nor will Merrick Garland be around to block his use of the Justice Department as his personal star chamber. He has grievances—he lives for grievances—and he will have the means to settle them to his liking, with little restraint. 

Could we depend on the courts to stop him? What armies do they have?

In 2015 and 2016, I enjoyed the jokes about Trump. Then suddenly, he won and they weren’t funny. Yes, Biden beat him in 2020, but Biden’s approval has sunk to the lowest of any president in the last 15 years. He’s in trouble.

And Trump just keeps getting stronger politically. I read today in the NYT that his charismatic strongman persona is appealing to many in Iowa, the first caucus state. Another NYT piece said college-educated Republicans nationally are finding their way back to him. His blue collar base, of course, never left.

The things I want to protect are the personal and economic safety of my family. Out on a farm in Iowa in the 1800s that would mean keeping my fences mended and my rifle loaded. 

But how do we keep assets safe from government appropriation in today’s world? By stuffing them under mattresses or in closet safes? By making deposits in local banks under the control of the Fed and the Treasury Department?

 

Personal safety is trickier still. Despite our lust for guns, rifles aren’t going to save us from assaults by the FBI, IRS or Justice Department, never mind the US Army.

I’m new to apocalypse planning. I’ve been like the wealthy Jews in Vienna in the late 1930s before Hitler took everything from them, including their lives. They thought that couldn’t happen to them. They were pillars of their economic community, after all. 

Of course it did happen to them. Is Trump our Hitler? I don’t know, but he says things that make me seriously concerned he would like to be.

All I’ve been able to come up with so far is to keep financial assets in liquid securitie in big national investment firms. I should be able to get at those from anywhere in the world, as long as I am not personally under attack and my assets frozen, which, since I am peaceful and law-abiding, would mean the US had devolved into a Fascist state determined to persecute anyone who might challenge it, a category I would certainly fall into. Couldn’t I just be quiet to protect myself? I don’t know. I doubt it. Honestly, I hope not.

Riding out the storm in another country is appealing as a last resort. I like it here. Specifically, I like it in California, a state that aligns with my values. I don’t want to move, but I’d like to know I had a sanctuary if worst came to dreadfully worst.

The Jews who got out of Vienna before Kristallnacht fared a lot better than those who had faith in their government, indeed in their fellow citizens, and stayed.

The risk of complacency here in the US has now become, for me, unacceptably high.