Living in Fear: Can a Political System That Uses Threats and Dire Consequences To Raise Money and “Awareness” Be Long for This World?

And if not, what should we replace it with?

Fear.

That near-death sensation we feel as an all too familiar rattling sound comes up behind us.

The panic that sets in when a policeman walks toward our front door at three in the morning.

We all know it.

We all dread it.

We all understand that it’s evolutionary and keeps us from making dangerous mistakes — like hand-feeding the cute bears at Yosemite.

But it’s not something we want to rule our lives. It’s not something we think about when getting into our cars in the morning, biting into a Big Mac, or skiing on some fresh snow at Mammoth.

We can’t. It would be crippling. We’d stop thinking and acting and doing what we would normally do to live the best life we can.

But in Politics, especially American politics, fear is the whip used to control the narrative.

To guide the conversations.

To direct the flow of donations that tally in the billion$ each year to get the next George Santos, Mike Johnson, or MTG elected.

It’s the endless shouting of FIRE in the theater every damn time our asses hit the seats and the credits begin to roll.

When did Fear become the emotion of choice in American political strategy?

It was there during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 — but then there were actual missiles aimed at us so maybe fear was appropriate.

It was there during the Cold War, but the animosity coming from Russia was palpable, though perhaps overstated at times.

It reached new heights during the Vietnam War when we were told that a country the size of Italy was “threatening democracies” around the globe.

Its presence thrust into our lives via the nightly news as Walter Cronkite and fellow anchors told us how dire our situation was while stats of dead and wounded soldiers scrolled across the bottom of our TV screens like football scores on a Saturday afternoon.

Fear is not a passive emotion. It doesn’t create a calm easy effect on the nervous system. Its purpose is rooted in survival. When we feel it, we are driven to act, too often toward the wrong things for the wrong reasons.

Lately, as in the last five years, there’s been an escalation in the use of fear as a driving force in politics and society in general that far outstrips what’s taking place since at least as far back as the Nixon administration.

As fear grows so grows the distance between what our needs in society are and what we believe we can do about them. And into this gap, for some as yet unknown reason, money pours in.

Our minds, our voices, our abilities to write letters and knock on doors, once a mainstay of political campaigning are not as much in demand. Wanted yes, but in smaller, more measured amounts.

What is needed, what is essential to any successful political strategy today is a war chest that would have made Genghis Khan drool.

Millions of dollars replace what thousands of dollars could once achieve.

Money resolves all issues. It keeps the enemies of America at the borders. As we use it to dismantle opposing ideals and those that espouse them.

Every day tens of billions of messages are sent forth like an armada of winged creatures scouring the countryside for fresh sources of capital.

And as truth becomes less a priority and more a hindrance, we are alerted to impending disasters if we don’t dig deep, by headlines and subject lines designed to instill fear or its familiar precursors anxiety, worry, acid stomach and nausea.

I’m OUTRAGED

I’m Fed up

I’m raging

They’re coming at us

The clock is ticking

I had to fight for my life on Jan 6

Clown car of Republicans in Ohio

This is a hard email to write

I won’t beat around the bush

This is your last chance

never happened before (not good news)

Yes, money is needed. To fix a car, build a home, repair a street, feed a family, or any one of a thousand other things we come across every day. And yet filling the airwaves with attack ads, and computer-generated graphics that rival Marvel films apparently is more important.

Because if the world goes to shit, who cares if the paint on the house is looking weathered.

If the GOP wins all branches of the government, then love happiness and family will have to be put on hold — indefinitely.

And to prevent all of this, like the great winds from above coming in to wreck the advancing enemy fleet almost at our shores is — — advertising.

Who knew it had such power?

Who knew telling voters that so and so is bad for business, bad for families, and bad for America, 100 times a day would turn it all around and send the real hero to victory?

And if we don’t know who that candidate is, not to worry they were fully vetted and we can rest easy that they’ll do the job.

Ah huh.

The system we have relied on forever is broken.

It’s been reduced to schoolyard bullying tactics and threats to make people respond.

And the really sad part of this is that negative ads that attack people, and policies and come at us at great expense — work.

What does that say about us, as individuals and a society that standing there, anywhere, screaming insults at an opponent gets attention, gets clicks, and sways people one way or another?

With the Internet acting as one long anonymous wall from which to hurl rocks, insults, and threats is it any wonder that too many of us act like we’re no longer part of our own civilization?

Politics is a divisive subject. It’s no longer about finding the right person for an important job but the right outlet to deliver a prepackaged message to persuade voters.

And the signs of dysfunction are everywhere. In fact, dysfunction seems to be the end game.

Get people so disgusted with the ways things are, so tired of their interests not being addressed that the unthinkable rises to the surface as acceptable options.

Solutions that would have been laughed at just a few years ago are now being written into platforms and agendas that are backed by those with more money than sense and allegiance to nothing but their own continued survival

Congress in all honesty hasn’t been a place of reason for a long time, but it was once possible to get things done. Now the bar has been so lowered that all we see from out here is the daily reenactment of the Sharks v. the Jets — only without the accompanying music from West Side Story.

Fear is inevitable it’s needed to ensure we get through the current disasters facing all of us.

So, we don’t want it to go away completely because we should be afraid.

But ironically, the one refuge we historically leaned into whenever man and nature overwhelmed us with fear and desperation — our faith in religions — is now the one place that is driving many of these insane changes as our society takes one evangelical broadside after another.

What does that say about our reliance on doctrines that were ancient when the great Redwoods were saplings and have been twisted mightily to fit into today’s cultures when at best they were comforting to those souls living those words two thousand years ago?

Why can’t a religion just be a place for solace? Why does it demand to sit at the table not so quietly nudging all who make the decisions that affect our lives in every way imaginable?

Is it God’s will to dictate how we run a country? To determine who has the right to pray, to marry, to direct the needs of our own bodies?

When the man, second in line to the presidency believes that great Woolly Mammoths, Dinosaurs, and Saber-toothed Tigers walked alongside those building the great pyramids in Egypt and Central America — then we should be trembling.

On second thought maybe fear should remain a part of our political system warning us that change for its own sake is dangerous. That reason is still all around us, only wanting someone to take hold and use it.

And yet fear is exhausting. Fear dulls the sense, makes bullies look like heroes and heroes look like something we no longer want.

When scientists discuss flight, flight, or freeze, they seldom mention rational thought or the contemplation of optimum survival.

We don’t react our way to great decisions. Divorce, bankruptcy, and the rate of accidental deaths speak to fear playing too large a role in our lives. Guiding us certainly, but toward what end?

Maybe fear should remain part of the process unless and until we show ourselves that it’s no longer needed and that those who use it and the extremes of religion for their own purposes, find a better use for their principles.