The Five Fears

My apologies for any typos, grammatical errors.  This is from my heart, am not doing even a spell check.  It is what it is. 

Fear destroys freedom.  Fear makes people willing, even eager, to hand over their freedom & liberties for an assurance of greater security, even if they know it is bogus.  They turn over, of their own free will, what is precious beyond measure for something that's mere sham. 

They wait in long lines & are careful not to take anything liquid in their online luggage when they fly, taking off their shoes & making sure that they put all their metal items in a little dish before walking through hulking metal detectors, a security precaution that is for show, since so many other areas of access to the actual aircraft are left wide open.  The TSA rules aren't to provide actual safety, but to assure the masses through an appearance of it.

The Patriot Act.  The NSA data collection.  The push, after the shooting at Pulse, not for tighter gun regulations but for more surveillance access.

One of the greatest hits we took as a culture after 9/11 was the massive fear of vulnerability that was left behind.  "How could this happen to us?"  "Who messed up that this happened?'" "What can we do to ensure that this never happens again?"  The country wanted assurances of protection, which no government can really give, & traded our freedoms for the reassurance of the appearance of safety.

We were still reeling from 2001 when we were hit with the 2008 financial meltdown, which left our nation in the grip of a fear of scarcity.  We saw savings vanish, saw jobs head overseas to cheaper labor markets, saw retirees working at Walmart & Giant Supermarket, saw "a good wage for a good hour's work" disappear.  The wealthy recovered, the poor absorbed the hit & moved on, but the mighty American middle class was left shattered.  And determined to hold onto what they have, grieve for what they've lost.  Without any help from the government to recover.  They see the cause of their sad lot not in the financial institutions that caused the calamity, but in the people who were sold loans they couldn't afford, in the illegal immigrants who do the jobs Americans shun.

From a president who doesn't look like any that came before to people who dress & worship differently than most of us, to the babble of foreign voices heard at the next table at a coffee shop, to wondering what those letters mean advertising an international food store - we are surrounded by evidence of The Other, the Not Us.  How did an African-American with a suspicious-sounding name, whose stepfather was raised a Muslim, who is - unlike Clarence Thomas - married to an African-American whose ancestors were slaves ~ ~ how did he manage to be elected President of the United States TWICE?  Why are there so many Eastern Europeans strolling around the grounds of my beautiful cathedral?  Is the food at the restaurant Mexican-Americans frequent as tasty as what get at Taco Bell?  Is that woman in the hijab looking plotting chaos & murder? 

We stock our houses with bottled water because our nation's water systems are breaking down.  We hope that the chemicals fracking companies inject deep into the ground won't contaminate the soil & poison our water.  Parched housing developments built in dry areas that can't sustain them are forced to import water. Once mighty rivers are in danger of becoming a trickle, mighty dams hold back a fraction of the water they once held, a scarcity of winter snow leaves reservoirs unstocked with spring run off, dry conditions kill off trees while lightning strikes turn tinder into wild fires.

We are isolated from one another, often living great distances from other members of our families, no longer banded together into small towns & strong communities.  Work transfers families without regard to the impact on the indivduals.  People of all ages are more dependent on their digital devices than on one another.  We have gone from living within tribes & clans to living increasingly solitary lives, having a silo existence. 

Fear of vulnerability.

Fear of scarcity.

Fear of The Other.

Fear of the environment.

Fear of authentic connection.

The Five Fears that drive so much of today's social political spiritual melt down. 

Well, I choose joy.  And faith.  I choose believing that others are doing the best they can in any given situation.  I choose believing in the deeply rooted American value that people have the right to disagree with me, even if it drives me nuts. I choose to take no thought for the morrow, to do my best in this moment.  I choose to be grateful for all that I was give & to do everything I can to share what I have - what I consider scarcity another considers wealth.  I will brush away the fears that seek to hold sway over my life. 

I will not give Osama Bin Laden the great victory he sought - I will live my life in hope & gratitude, not in fear & terror.  Because all who do, give him the posthumous glory & victory he sought.  I will not let those who died in the twin towers, at the Pentagon, in a Pennsylvania field, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, all over the world, die in vain.  I will live every day of my life celebrating the Four Freedoms my country celebrates - Freedom of Worship, of Speech, from Want, from Fear - and let that be my greatest legacy.

The Four Freedoms

 

Remember the Four Freedoms, the ones that FDR first espoused on July 5, 1940 & shared with the world in January 1941, that Norman Rockwell so beautifully captured?  It feels like Americans have either forgotten or have wildly different ideas of what is meant by WORSHIP   SPEECH   FEAR   WANT.

President Franklin Roosevelt - a man as divisive as President Obama, with millions loving & other millions loathing him - first shared those words with reporters gathered for an impromptu press conference at Hyde Park, the president's New York home.  He was talking about events unfolding in Europe when he first brought up his view of our basic freedoms.  Reading the first, can't help by think of today's net neutrality battles:


“You might say there are certain freedoms. The first I would call ‘freedom of information,’ which is terribly important. It is a much better phrase than ‘freedom of the press,’ because there are all kinds of information so that the inhabitants of a country can get news of what is going on in every part of the country and in every part of the world without censorship and through many forms of communication.” 

He went onto share three more universal freedoms  - the freedom of religion, the freedom to  “express one’s self as long as you don’t advocate the overthrow of government,” then added the novel “freedom from fear, so that people won’t be afraid of being bombed from the air or attacked, one way or the other, by some other nation.”  


The Political Setting
While it's of interest to know the physical setting of the 07/05/40 "off the record" press conference was a study in a mansion along the Hudson, it's crucial to understand the political setting.  

Hard to imagine that it was July of a presidential election year & the Republicans had only just picked their candidate, the Dems didn't have a clue who they'd pick in a couple weeks.  

The GOP was still getting to know their candidate, Wendell Wilkie, a "dark horse" choice who sounds very familiar in a lot of ways to the current presumed Republican candidate.  A large part of his appeal was Wilke's total lack of political experience,  A lifelong Democrat, the Wall Street-based industrialist switched parties in 1939.  He hadn't run in the primaries - which were very different from what we know today - but curried favor with party power brokers & opinion-molding newspapers.  Behind the scenes, in actual smoke-filled rooms, party bosses had the real say in who nabbed the nomination.  By the time Wilkie arrived in Philadelphia, his star was on the ascend while all the rest were falling or had crashed.  FDR was leery of the Republican nominee, fearing Wilkie didn't have "much knowledge of the world … he would have had to learn … in the school of hard experience.”   

At the time Roosevelt had his chat with reporters, the Democratic convention was still a couple weeks away.  Several Democrats - Postmaster James Farley, VP John Nance Garner & Senator Burton Wheeler - had thrown their hats in the ring, assuming FDR would honor the tradition of limiting himself to two terms.  Seek an unprecedented 3rd term?  He had not made any move toward openly seeking it. 

If FDR was shaken by the GOP's choice, he was also alarmed by his party's options.  Garner was a Texas conservative, Wheeler was an isolationist.  Farley would have been an outstanding successor BUT he was Catholic, which - in 1940 - would have made him virtually a non-starter to win the presidency.


Back to Hyde Park

All of that was on the reporters' minds as they listened to the president speak. They knew what he was referring to when he continued,  “The question really comes down to whether we are going to continue to seek those freedoms or whether we are going to give up.” 


A reporter for my own local newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, spoke up.  "Well, I had a fifth in mind, which you might describe as ‘freedom from want’—free trade, opening up trade.”

FDR responded, “Yes, that is true. I had that in mind but forgot it. Freedom from want—in other words, the removal of certain barriers between nations, cultural in the first place and commercial in the second place. That is the fifth, very definitely.” 

What grew out of this shared discussion would be the Four Freedoms the President shared in his 1941 State of the Union speech, in which he proclaimed America had a mandate to spread over a troubled world.  

 
Eleanor's Influence

The day before her husband shared his thoughts with the White House press corps, decamped to the Hudson, Eleaor Roosevelt shared HER understanding of the American Revolution's lasting legacy.  In her “My Day” newspaper column, datelined July 4, she wrote:



I personally want to continue to live in a country where I can think as I please, go to any church I please, or to none if that is my desire; say what I please, and within the limits of any free society, do what I please. 

I want the right to work, and I want that opportunity to be extended to all my fellow citizens. I want them to have an equal opportunity for educational development, for health and for recreation, which is all part of the building of a human being capable of coping with the modern world.


Which Brings Us to FDR's 1941 State of the Union

Unlike FDR & the reporters (all male) in his study, Eleanor saw the liberties our ancestors won as more, deeper than what her husband had shared. Her perception merged with his to become the freedoms he shared six months later with a frightened nation & world:  


We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. 

The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. 

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world. 

 

The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world. 

The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world. 

That speech helped buttress America for what would come in less than a year.  The Four Freedoms - a collaboration between a president as divisive as our present occupant of the White House, a First Lady reviled by as many (perhaps more) than HRC - are still held dear, or at least we claim they are, by Americans from coast to coast, from the glaciers of Alaska to the lava beaches of Hawaii.  

Now, more than ever, we need to step & far away from those fears that surround & - with too many - fill  us.  Our ancestors beseech us to remember those freedoms & all that they mean if the American dream that is the foundation of any greatness isn't to become our national nightmare.

 

Oh, in case you're wondering how FDR came to run for his history-making 3rd term - a "reluctant to run" Roosevelt was drafted by his party AT the convention, nominated from the floor. 

Well, excuuuuuuuze me!

 

Or to quote another TV icon - suhprEYES  suhprEYES  suprEYES!!!  An enraged GOP is going to  hold hearings into the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's stupid reckless idiotic use of a private e-mail server.  Ya know, the same thing that Colin Powell did, except Republicans say that he did it in a gentler time when the internet wasn't so DANGEROUS.  


Let's just get something clear here - we're talking about e-mail.  We're talking about a politician who is infamous for her quest to control.  We're talking about doing something truly questionable, but that she is NOT the  first Secretary of State to have done it.  We talking about State supposedly not knowing about her use of the private server when they were sending & getting e-mails from it.  We're talking about the possibility that her server might have been hacked, while we know for sure the State Department's were.

The FBI investigated.  The head of the FBI is a lifelong Republican who was appointed to the post by George W. Bush.  He clearly was not happy to not find "enough" evidence to indict the Dem's presidential candidate, a woman in the running for Most Loathed Female in America.  But the Federal Bureau of Investigations did their duty & came up with nada that called for charges of criminal activity.  

Hillary Rodham Clinton appears, at face value, to be flawed by her need for control, appears to many to have zilch ethical core, comes across as cold & calculating, an enabling wife & feels entitled to be the first woman president.  Those are all terrible characteristics for anyone & certainly doesn't bode well in a Commander In Chief.  But they do not make her a criminal.  

Unless you're a conservative Republican, then the very absence of any proof of criminal activity is the surest proof that she is guilty guilty guilty.

  

Wel, excuuuuuuuuuze me - that is just stupid.  And now we are looking at Paul Ryan calling for the GOP House to hold hearings to investigate the investigation.   The Senate can't find time to hold hearings on the SCOTUS nominee then letting it come up for a vote, but the House is eager to investigate the FBI.  Do an online search of the response by representatives to Director Comey's announcement.  They throw around the an utterly unsubstantiated use of "criminal," but most of their comments are hotly framed accusations of various forms of recklessness & poor judgment.  The GOP equivalent of "Liar! Liar! Pants on fire!"

Sheez, I should not be suhprEYESed one little bitty bit. Called 'em out as wimpy, spineless pantywaists.  They are acting according to their nature.  Can no more stop themselves than Blackie can resist chasing the laser light.  And that is INexcuuuuuuusable.