Slowly but surely, inexorably, every step this country takes pushes us farther into a corner. It didn’t start with 9/11, but it certainly accelerated our descent into fear, and we are now reaping what we have sown. A populace who succumbs to the shouted words of its leaders to “protect yourselves,” “be alert,” “report suspicious activity,” and complies, putting police officers in schools, adding security protocols layer by layer, selling military-grade weapons to local police departments – this populace has come to this: snipers on rooftops shooting at peaceful demonstrations, punching each other at political rallies, spending millions of dollars attempting to block individuals from using public restrooms.
How can we be surprised? When we have all listened to the rhetoric that warns us about the Other?
How can we feign shock when we have been conditioned to look for what separates us and be on guard?
When our politicians increasingly skip over the step of diplomacy and build coalitions to “bomb the shit out of [insert country/terrorist group here],” can we not see how much of our collective American psyche is built on fear?
The thing about fear is that it is necessarily reactive. We like to think it is proactive, that we are simply PROTECTING OURSELVES, but the act of protection means that there is something we are afraid of. And in protecting ourselves, we build walls, we isolate ourselves and retreat into tight spaces where often the only recourse is to fight our way out. We have bought into the idea that in order to be safe, we must be feared ourselves, and so we arm ourselves with weapons and hateful words to be used against others.
And this fear takes on a life of its own – it prompts someone to report a suspicious character simply because of the way he or she is dressed or to be kicked off of an airplane for being middle eastern and doing math.
It takes us to the point where we are so fearful of sharing a public restroom with someone who doesn’t look like us, act like us, think like us, that we try to enact laws to keep transgendered people from peeing in the stall next to us.
Every time an unarmed person of color is shot by a police officer, we live the result of that fear.
Every time a non-binary-gender-conforming person is killed or beaten, we live the result of that fear.
Every time we choose violence over dialogue and assume that the only way to protect ourselves is by shooting first, we reinforce that fear and paint ourselves farther into that corner.
The United States has become a country whose primary focus is on protecting itself, whose primary motivation – by default – is fear. It will only get worse from here unless we make a conscious effort to elect officials who come from a place of community, openness, shared humanity. The only thing we will get from fear is more fear.
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