“We have nothing to fear, but fear itself”

In 1933, the American Great Recession was in full swing. Unemployment was 25%, times were about as bleak as they could get. Already the rumblings of discontent in Europe were foretelling the Second Great War, and Americans standing in line for handouts were in despair.

A new President was inaugurated that year, and in his first inaugural speech, in the very first paragraph, Franklin Delano Roosevelt told us that “…we have nothing to fear, but fear itself.”

By virtue of a late second marriage and a young wife wanting children, my father was a young man of 18 years in 1933. It wasn’t bad enough that he was born and raised in one of the poorest parts of the nation and was already handicapped with near poverty, he had to start his adult life in the depths of the greatest economic crisis yet to hit the United States. There wasn’t much for work in the hills of East Tennessee, until Franklin got busy and great institutions such as the Tennessee Valley Authority came to be.

My mother, some twenty years younger than Dad, was a pre-teen during the height of World War II. She and her sisters and brother were packed up for much of the war and sent off to live with their grandmother on the Satilla River in Southern Georgia. My grandparents then hustled off to work at the shipyards in Panama City, Florida, building Liberty Ships by the dozens.

At no time during my childhood was I ever aware of my parents or my grandparents being afraid of anything. I was born in the post-WW-II era of America where we were convinced that everything was possible. That we were always in the right, that we would always conquer evil.

Of course, in those days, evil was something that was well defined and could be identified by even the youngest schoolchild. Phrases like “the Iron Curtain”, “Commies” and “Reds”, and by the mid-60’s “Viet-Cong” all summarized in a breath or two all that was evil in our American world.

Even when stupendously overwhelming events occurred, as kids, we never got any sense of imminent danger that would get any closer to us than the television screen flickering in the living room. When the Cuban missile crisis loomed over our heads in October of 1962, I don’t think that we kids were all that aware of just how close we came. I was a month away from my seventh birthday when that occurred, and in second grade at the private school run by the 7th Day Adventists in town. I think that we were taken to school in the mornings, but walked home in the afternoon, about a mile. Something that would cause parents today to be arrested for child neglect or child abuse I’m sure. Even though we were barely 100 miles north of Havana, I don’t recall any particular sense of danger, or any special precautions. Today, I see where school children were taught to huddle under their desks, but I don’t recall us actually having any of those drills. 

My parents and grandparents were avid watchers of the Huntley and Brinkley report on NBC news, so I’m sure that in the background, the news of the crisis was available to me, but at nearly 7-years old, TV news was not something I would willingly watch. In fact, TV was still new enough that it seldom had much appeal over playing outside or a good book. My parents weren’t afraid, at least not in any way that communicated down to my childish brain.

A year later, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated I do remember coming home from school early that day, and rushing breathlessly into my great-grandmothers tiny living room, astonished to find nearly every adult I knew gathered around her TV in mid-day. I was “shushed” by a half-dozen at once, and for at least a couple of days I was aware of a great confusion and sadness, but again, nothing gave me any sense that the adults in my life were afraid of anything.

In our Post-911 world, it seems that we Americans have become afraid of everything. We are no longer on a first-name basis with our neighbors, and we seem to look for absurd meanings to common everyday situations. As this Salon.com article shows, we seem to have gone to extremes. Every rustle of a leaf gives us a reason to scurry back into the safety of our homes, like cockroaches under the fridge when the kitchen light pops on.

One of the better examples of this was brought home to me in detail this past Sunday morning when our doorbell rang at 8:30 in the morning. We lead a rather quiet life, few friends, and most of the time, from all outward appearances you would assume no one is home at our house. We park in the garage and our yard is neat, clean and free of any clutter or indicators of the humans that live within. It’s rare that our doorbell rings at that hour on a Sunday morning.

Imagine our great surprise when we are confronted by not one, not two, but THREE deputy Sheriff’s standing at the door and asking for entry. Having not the foggiest idea of what may be going on, our first thought is that someone died and our phones were out of service, or that maybe there was a gas leak in the neighborhood. Despite the adult in me knowing that I have rights, that I don’t have to open the door to a policeman unless I wish too, that I am the one in control, the sight of three law-enforcement officers standing at your front door turns your knees to jelly and your brain backpedals to try and figure out what you did wrong. Did you remember to pay for that item before you left the store the last time you were at Home Depot? Yes, it gets ridiculous.

It turns out to be something quite absurd – my neighbor had complained that I had mounted a plastic owl on the fence between us, and that the owl contained a camera, and that I was filming his bedroom window or the back of his house.

Of course, we were flabbergasted. Yes, a few months ago we purchased a plastic hawk and a plastic owl from Amazon and mounted them on the fence in an attempt to scare away a pesky mourning dove that insists on perching on our chimney and hollering his love-struck song down into our family room at full throttle. For hours on end. Yes, some weeks ago, in an across-the-yard conversation with our neighbor, I had mentioned that I had installed a security camera or two around the house, that sent me emails if they detected movement.

Our neighbor, with whom we’ve always had a somewhat tenuous relationship, put two and two together, came up with five,  and decided that we had some desire to point a camera at his back door or windows for some nefarious purpose. Instead of being decent about it and knocking on the door and asking, he places a call to the local gestapo, and we end up being a spectacle for all the neighbors to observe on a sunny Sunday morning.  Of course the plastic Owl and Hawk were nothing more than cheap plastic decoy’s, and our neighbor was shown to be the idiot we’ve always suspected, but even worse, it’s an example of how far we will go to assume an absurd explanation for something that turns out to be nothing more than someone’s lunch, or a child’s science experiment, or simply an imitation bird of prey.

Was it the fact that two gay men had the nerve to live next door to him? He’s never been really comfortable with that, and for the first two years we couldn’t even get a head-nod out of him if we saw each other in the yard. His wife has been mostly lovely, but gradually over the years we felt that perhaps our neighbor was relaxing and realizing that we were decent humans, certainly good stewards of the neighborhood, and perhaps not nefarious at all. Were we a husband and wife instead of a husband and husband, would he have simply asked us about the owl instead?

We did get a pitiful letter from him that tried to explain his line of thought, how he had consulted with a trusted friend, who advised that the police be involved in a discussion between the two of us, which only shows again how many people, Americans even, are so afraid of the world now that they can’t even strike up a simple conversation with a neighbor they’ve lived next to for most of a decade. Most striking about his letter was how he assumed that his description of his fear would make me feel better about him assuming I was some sort of slimy pervert.

There were lots of alternative paths that this event could have taken before it spiraled into the absurd. Our neighbor could have simply picked up the owl off the fence post and looked inside of it. He could have called us on the phone, or he could have walked the 15 steps to the east that it would have taken him to reach our doorbell. He could have caught one of us at the mailbox – our mailbox sits right next to his. He could have caught one or the other of us as we put the trash bins out or taken them in – all of these natural occurrences where we often meet or see each other.

It occurred to me that he has two pre-teen daughters. While I have no clue whether or not there was any family discussion of his angst, I wonder that if they didn’t pick up on the fact that he was afraid of something or bothered by something. His example of how to handle such a problem teaches those children that you shouldn’t work to resolve simple issues with simple actions. And that’s a problem. Multiply that across our new post-911 American world, and you see that despite the assurances of Franklin Roosevelt, we have succumbed to fear.

I don’t feel any sense of community as an adult. Perhaps when I was a child, the fact that we lived next door to my grandparents and great-grandparents helped to foster a sense of belonging and completeness. Perhaps having a stay-at-home mom, coming home to a house that always smelled like cookies, where dinner was served at the dining room table instead of in front of the TV helped me have a sense of being comfortable.

Today, the world seems to be running at full speed. Parents seem to be under pressure to take their kids from soccer practice to piano lessons and then the ju-jitsu class before heading home to a dinner of delivered pizza while they do their child’s homework. No one sits on the lawn anymore watching the kids because the kids are inside playing video games. Television isn’t good unless it’s so bloody and violent you can barely stand to watch it. I often comment that if my grandmother was still around and turned on a TV today, it wouldn’t be five minutes before you’d see the thing tossed through a window.

Our society seems to have gone to hell in a hand-basket, and I feel powerless to do anything about it. I’ve seen and read about absurd incidents where a swat team was called out to investigate someones lunch bag, but until this past week I was truly not aware of just how far into fear we had sunk.

Sure, the incident with my neighbor was silly and absurd, but it’s an example of how we are no longer capable of fending for ourselves without asking for help from our government. And by doing that for very small and simple things, we end up giving our government power over our lives where it was never intended. Today, by virtue of our fear, we have granted our government permission to interfere in our daily lives to an extent that would give James Madison an ulcer. We’ve elected Senators and Representatives to office who’s primary goal seems to be to get re-elected, no matter what; instead of doing whatever is best to serve the community from which they were elected. With no one at the helm and everyone in government looking out for themselves, we end up with the NSA snooping where they have no legal right to be, with our military acting as beat cops for every disturbance on the globe, and everyone pointing a finger at everyone else and wondering why someone isn’t doing something to fix it.

In any case, I know that I’m not afraid of my neighbor. I simply think he’s an ass, and it’s doubtful I’ll go out of my way to speak to him again. He’s the one who needs to earn my trust, not the other way around. But, if I have an issue with him, rather it’s his dog barking away in the back yard, or his children screaming at 110 decibels for hours as they “play”, I’m man enough to go ring his doorbell and talk to him about it instead of calling in the Sheriff.