Monday, June 20, 2022 | 2 a.m.
View more of the Sun's opinion section
I wrote “Do not be afraid” as I began this column. Then I crossed it out.
Because it’s OK to be afraid. Without healthy fear, we stick our hands into coals, or sit by and watch all we’ve built crumble into dust or unfairness or rising sea levels.
So be afraid. But don’t stay afraid. Do not be paralyzed by fear. Or manipulated by it.
Because in this wild, wacky world we live in, fear is profitable. It drives traffic to websites and viewers to cable news networks. It makes you question what you know and what you thought you knew and the nature of who you are. It is a tool used by politicians, who plaster the airwaves and the twitterverse with fears of what you stand to lose from stated and unstated “thems.”
Immigrants, trans kids, people who don’t look like you, environmentalists, scientists, physicians, education, gay people, people who don’t think like you, those who look at our history so closely that they may stumble across flaws.
Fear is strategy No. 1 for political consultants, for ad men and women who create campaigns that ask not what candidates can do for their states or their country, but who they can do it to.
Fear sells. Fear works. It triggers fight-or-flight response, so we end up with nuts in animal fur crashing through windows of the U.S. Capitol. It works, so we see previously engaged people hide their heads under pillows, hoping it will all go away.
We have been warned.
When we look back on the most important things our presidents have ever said to us, we have to start with George Washington, speaking in his farewell address of the dangerous power of the political party.
“It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration,” he said. “It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. … A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.”
Prescient, shall we say.
Abraham Lincoln, before he was elected, warned that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” And after that became sadly evident he reminded us as president that this country was dedicated to the proposition of equality.
And of course it was FDR, in his first inaugural, who with the nation in the throes of depression told us to speak truth, frankly and boldly, to not “shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country.”
It is timeless, and so timely it hurts.
We tend to remember the sound bite from that speech: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
But there’s more to it than that. It rings today like a warning, like a rebuke to fearmongers and political trolls who would urge us to fear each other rather than work together to protect the planet, or humanity’s future, or the notion of humanity itself.
“Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance,” Roosevelt said.
He also spoke that day about compassion and courage and work. And what it means to build a better America.
“Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort,” he said. “The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.”
Perhaps our own dark days will be worth all they cost, if they teach us that disagreement is not a sin, that decency should be an American virtue, that defending our own rights is no excuse for taking rights from someone else, and that we can only save our country if we save our world.
It’s OK to be afraid. It’s not OK to be played.
John Archibald is a columnist for AL.com.
