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.