The Demaon of Fear

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” So spoke president Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his first inaugural address in 1933.  The economy suffered a deep depression that would have devastating effects on people, poor and rich alike, for years.  Was his statement overly optimistic or perhaps bravado?  To the extent that it gave people hope and prevented deeper morose, the words were worth their weight in gold.

But hardly before the Depression ended, a new fear enshrouded the country—the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the start of World War 2.  The uncertainty of the outcome was a basis for fear, but was eventually offset with a profound faith that we could prevail.  And we did with the end of the war and the beginning of a period of unparalleled economic growth, scientific advance and social advance.

But shortly into this happy state a new fear emerged—the Cold War and the Soviet Union’s nuclear advance.  The fear now was destruction of the entire world.  But after more than 30 years, this fear ended, at least for a while.  We emerged into a new era of peace and prosperity, much of which might be attributed to the Cold War and its scientific and technology advances.

But the technology advances spawned a new fear known as Y2K.  Because everything from business to banking to transportation depended on computer technology, the fear was that the data processing could not roll over from December 31,1999 to January 1, 2000 and everything that we depended on would come to a screeching stop.  This, unlike earlier fears, turned out to be totally unfounded, but many people world-wide cowered in fear.

A little over a decade later, terrorists struck on what is known as 9/11 and killed over 3000 of our people.  A new fear struck us—that of continued acts of terrorism on our soil.  Perhaps our intelligence community changed its ways, perhaps the terrorists were not as capable as we thought or for other reasons no mass destruction has occurred since then.  How many attacks have our forces thwarted?  One might need access to classified information to know that.

Now we are in a new fear mode—the fear that ISIS (Daesh, ISIL or whatever) will come here and kill us en mass.  There is a tendency to see them as ten feet tall and unstoppable, and to be unaware of what is being done to stem the tide. It’s a reprise of old fears and should be dealt with rationally. 

The beneficial side of fear is continued vigilance (so that we never again look back after an event such as Pearl Harbor or 9/11 and reflect on our lack of awareness).  The bad side of fear includes irrational thinking and the ugly blot of anger which can spawn road rage, family discord and lack of proper community responsibility.

Our society needs to deal rationally with this and any fears that will appear in the future.