Thursday, May 11, 2017

The Safety Game

Imagine a world without fear or hatred.

It is difficult, given today's climate, as there are times when I fear we have become addicted to fear itself. We seek situations where all we do is fear, we respond to it so readily, and it feels like the most powerful force in our lives.

There are times I feel when we would rather live in fear and do something active to counter this feeling than we would living in a state of no fear at all.

After all, how certain could we be that we are 'doing something about it' if we lived in relative peace and security? So we put ourselves in danger just to rationalize that somehow our actions are controlling that element of risk and uncertainty.

Most likely? What we do has no cause or effect on what happens in the future, but I feel the net effect is we overall raise the level of fear for everybody so somehow we can come out ahead of others in this perverse 'safety game.'

It is like buying an alarm system for your house and feeling good when you hear someone else's house gets robbed.

The ideal situation? Nobody robs anybody and everybody feels safe and secure without having to resort to these behavioral and societal safety pins and deflection techniques.

It feels like we always have to have someone to blame, monsters under the bed, boogeymans, strange people in the neighborhood, the other people, the new gal or guy, people that are different than us, or a convenient scapegoat who we can prop up as an element of fear. And then like an opioid we pop into our mouths, when we don't get our fix of fear, we import sources of fear into our lives to get that hit.

It is that obsessive-compulsive behavior where we engage in self-destructive actions just so we can feel good when we do something to correct the situation.

And then we are back into the same-old same-old the next time we want that feeling of shame, purging, and salvation - like someone who drinks, feels bad about it, throws away all of their liquor, and then goes right back into the same old the next time.

And often they never realize how much hurt they are causing to others. But in this case, it isn't one person ruining their life, it is a world ruining everyone's lives.

And naturally, like fear addicts, with fear comes its nasty side-effect, hatred. You can't have one without the other. You see these hate-filled posts online and venomous words spread through the media and you sit here and wonder why. We come down off our high of fear and sink into the depths of hatred, and we need to get another fear dose going so we can dull the pain for a while.

And everyone plays right into the game, online news, things I see on the television, people spouting fear so they can generate hate, people using hate to sell you fear, and the entire world seems powered by the venom of this wicked byproduct of our times. You hear a loaded word slipped into conversation just to score a point or get a reaction, they really couldn't have meant that, right? Why did they just say that? And when confronted, they weasel back under cover and start the game all over again. To sew fear. To cause hatred.

I feel we are so numb to it the next level always must be reached, those peddling fear and hatred must amp up the dosage to get us to react next time.

There is no quiet, no settled matter, nor any notion of subtle and right. Cooperation and doing things for the better of us all are thrown in the trash because it would give ammunition to the other side.

Don't help them.

Fear them.

You know I'm on your side.

And at this moment, they try to sell you something because your defenses are down. Be it a narrative, an alarm system, pills, or anything else where money or power is traded to salve insecurity inflicted upon our psyches. It is one of the classic snake-oil salesman techniques, put on a global and also very personal scales.

I don't know where this is going, but I don't like it. We grow jaded and hardened to each other. Our empathy for each other dies under the weight of our insecurities. We seek to inflict damage rather than heal and come together. There is no greater good. There is only scoring points.

This horrible...safety game...is the one thing which I truly fear.

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