The World is Scary and if You’re Not Scared, You Better Start Being Scared

The world is a scary place and I make no mistake about that. We’re told this all the time by our media, politicians, loved ones, and culture. In politics, the fear generated by world events is used to the benefit of those with or seeking power. If a threat is not actually a threat, it is often exaggerated and made into something much more than what one should actually expect. With elections coming shortly the fear-mongering once again is ratcheted up in order to make those of us who would make a stand and protest the status quo fall back into line and return the rich and powerful back to their rightful place of making our decisions for us.

We’re told that Muslims are coming to install Sharia Law across this country – much like we already did with Judeo-Christian law and the Native Americans – because they want to build mosques to worship in. Iran, it is to be believed, is building an arsenal of nuclear weapons to turn the U.S. and Israel into radioactive glass. Politicians, already rich, tell the poor that “entitlement” programs like social security, Medicare, and Medicaid need to be hacked apart in order to save our economy. In order to stop perhaps 100 individuals in Afghanistan we need to send thousands more soldiers into a decade -old war that could possibly see another 10 years of conflict. We had our rights ransacked by authoritarian politicians who blindly signed the so called Patriot Act while we still sobered from 9/11. The Tea Party will kill us all if we don’t vote for the Democrats. The Democrats will kill us all if we don’t vote for Tea Party conservatives. The U.S. will suddenly become a third world country if we have to dial “1″ for English just one more time. Politician X is a fascist and Politician Y is a communist. Death Panels and rationing.

America is a nation governed by fear-mongering sociopaths.

Fear has a terrible tendency to paralyze our ability to reason and instead makes acting rashly with emotion simple. JRB, over at ladypoverty, recently wrote a post asking what the Left’s excuse is for its lack of organization versus that of the infamous Tea Party. In the comments section we mulled over some reasons for the Tea Party’s apparent organization but not so much for the left’s. I would say that the problem is obviously the Left’s tendency to splinter into a myriad of factions. But this goes back to my central point here. We are enveloped in a culture that feeds on fear and a politics that is by design, divisive. The Tea Party is a reaction to that culture and politics while the Left is an antithesis to it. The Tea Party is a creature that is designed to thrive here, a changed world is necessary for the Left to thrive. So to answer JRB’s question, instead of just explaining the Tea Party’s organization, the Left’s excuse is that it is not designed to thrive in a culture or politics of fear.