TomFlannery.com

We’re scared.

Of everything and everybody. We’re scared of what we can’t see, and we’re scared of things that jump into our face.

We’re scared of what we don’t understand. We’re scared of each other and what might happen and what might not happen. We carry fear around like a wallet in the back pocket.

Mostly we’re scared of the things they tell us to be scared of, while the real terrors whistle with us as we pass the graveyard.

The fastest way to dumb down a population is to scare them.

We lay awake in the middle of the night staring into the void and conjure up every monster we can. We walk through our days like zombies and stare into our cups late at night looking for solace. We build walls and quarantine ourselves and blame the guy who looks different than us. Fear pushes people away and turns communities into no-go zones. Fear spreads faster than any virus, and can lay you out with the same vengeance.

There is no vaccine for it either. And there never will be.

To live in fear is like living with an infectious disease.

It can nibble at you….raise itself in the back of your head and make its way round to the front every now and again. Or it can bludgeon you like a 2X4 to the temple. And it will always show up at the most inopportune time.

To be afraid is to eventually become furious. So we lash out. At loved ones or the guy who won’t get out of the left lane or on some near-stranger’s facebook feed. We become instant experts and if only folks were as smart as us none of this would ever happen. Fear turns everybody into a narcissist, so the fear of others matters little…..even if theirs is what is feeding ours.

Fear despises intellect, which is why we ignore those who are clearly smarter than we are when they tell us that our fears are unfounded, and grasp the trouser leg of any moron who feels the same way we do, because there’s strength in numbers, Bubba. Fear constantly seeks validation.

We’re afraid for the young and we’re afraid for the old and we’re deathly afraid of cruise ships and running out of toilet paper. So we wash our hands until they crack and smartly buy up all the hand sanitizer so there’s none left for anybody else to prevent them from infecting us and suddenly men’s rooms are backed up and the entire world is coughing into their elbows and cancelling their St. Patrick’s Day parades and posting stupid memes in vain attempts to be clever and saying things like “but Dr Drew said” with a straight face and allowing Corona Beer stock to fall 40% and after a while dying of pneumonia doesn’t seem so bad after all.

We’re told to stay home and hunker down and we stare at the television and thus see nothing but more scared people acting like they’re not scared while they rant and rave at each other about how dumb everybody else is. We look to our leaders for any type of guidance and find….well…..about what you’d expect. So nobody really looks there anymore, unless things are moving really slow and you need a good chuckle.

FDR once said that “we have nothing to fear except fear itself.”

Donald Trump once said…” ‘Does anybody die from the flu?’ I didn’t know people died from the flu…”

Clearly this man has the BEST BOOKS.

(Actually, this sort of inspirational leadership might be one of the reasons day-to-day living now resembles a Walking Dead episode, but I’ll leave that for you non-partisan keyboard warriors to ponder and scream at each other about.)

And it’s 2020 and it just dawned on us that we’ve been washing our hands wrong this entire time, so clearly we’re not as advanced as we think we are.

This too shall pass. I hope soon. And then we’ll have something new to deal with. And then again. And then again. These days not walking around with fists clenched probably means you’ve hit on the correct medication. So good on you.

We fear most for our children’s future. Because I don’t want them staring into that same late night void. I want them leading the charge, not falling into line.

In a bit..

–tf