As a human being, fear is a driving motivation in my life. It’s one of the reasons I wake up in the morning and go to work. I’m…afraid that if I don’t do something, I will not get the “monetary reward” necessary to exist in this society that has been created around me albeit without my previous input. (If I had input 80 years ago…well…) It’s also what keeps me from doing stupid things like 100 miles an hour down the parkway and those “hold my mountain dew” moments before I attempt some stunt that could end badly.
Fear is not, however, THE driving motivation in my life. In fact the more I am told to be afraid of something, the less seriously I take the threat. “Oh well that’s because you never have had anything happen to you to make you really afraid, you’ve never been to war, never been held up…ne…” Well now wait…one second, I have not CHOSEN to go off to fight in the middle east but I know what fear is. Real fear, the fear that makes your brain say, “yea bud, looks like this is going to be the day it ends for ya”. Let me tell ya some stories, wanna hear ’em?…No? Well, here we go anyway.
As a kid of 13 years of age, I did, what little kids were want to do when we were young in the 1970’s, something a bit irrational. I followed my much older friends, (ok they were 14) to some trails in a neighboring town. We rode for a while and at the end of the day, headed home…along a different route than we used to get there. Which promptly got us completely, lost. Lost to the point that we wound up in one of the worst sections of a bad town that my parents would normally lose their minds over just to drive through. Be that as it was, I was there, along with two buddies hoping to get through this section to get back home safe and sound. It was not meant to be. Instead, a hoodrat blazed past us in one direction while another one came at us from behind and knocked the largest of us off our bikes. Another savory character then proceeded to jump us with, and I shit you not, a whittled down piece of tree branch as thick as a baseball bat. As we stood there, screwed, the juvenile delinquent confronting us gave us an ultimatum, “Give us your bikes, or fight us for them.” Since we did not have the good fortune to be carrying anything like a tree branch baseball bat, we had no choice but to acquiesce and run home. Oh…and yours truly, being the scared little turd he was, pissed his pants. (Like I said, those “welp, it’s over moments…”) We ran to the local police department, relayed the story and eventually got home. Long story short, my Father who used to live in that exact area, went there every day for a month until the punks who mugged us, gave up the goods by leaving them in a “vacant lot” nearby to be found by the cops. The town I am speaking about is Plainfield. At that point in time, Plainfield was a predominantly minority town, with mostly African American’s living there. Number one, we weren’t mugged by what would seem to be the most obvious choice racists would like you to think we would be mugged by. We got taken down by a caucasian and a hispanic. Sorta nice to see the races working together…albeit in a bad way. So, there I am, a 13 year old kid, recently mugged. Do I now let my mind go down the road of harboring anger and fear with every person I see that I might think looked “poor and white” or hispanic. Nope, wasn’t raised that way. Although I was afraid at that moment, I did not let that incident become a motivating factor in my life. I learned right there that fear is temporary and can be constrained by rational thought. I also learned by watching my Father just go there and confront those who did us wrong that people who attempt to instill fear can be laid low by constant unending pressure.
Not every moment of extreme fear though is rooted in people trying to purposefully hurt you either…sometimes it can be as simple as being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like driving in a car with an elderly gentleman and his family. Once, many years ago I was a rear seat passenger in a car that was being driven by an elderly gentleman who was the grandfather of a friend of mine. Whilst he was driving down a rather large highway in Florida and smoking a butt, he dropped and reached down to get it…which then had us driving directly across about 3 lanes of traffic DIRECTLY into ONCOMING traffic. I was quite literally sitting in the back seat watching cars swerve to avoid us thinking this is it, I’m checking out on this one…luckily the guys kid was riding shotgun and grabbed the wheel before we were involved in a headon doing 65+ miles per hour on the open road. THAT will put some fear into you. (It actually did with me, I had a hard time letting other people drive for DECADES after that. And any time someone else was driving and we entered a turn… oh yea, semi freak out mode.
There’s been other times of course. Traveling through the worst sections of Newark and Irvington repairing solar beacon locations wondering when the first shot will be fired. Falling off of ramps like a rag doll. All good times and all things that induce fear.
Fear, yep, the underlying factor in many people’s lives. Hell, it’s probably the reason many people are born, their parents are afraid of being alone as they get old and eventually pass away.
What fear most assuredly is, is the mind killer.
So, how does one counter fear?
It’s actually quite simple, knowledge. Fear, beyond the fight or flight response of the primitive sections of our mind is the unwillingness to accept that which we do not know or approach that which we do not understand. This illogical part of our brain though gets put on the back burner when knowledge enlightens the areas that are clouded by the unknown.
Replace, “I don’t know, I’m afraid” with “I’ve never seen that, I’m curious” and whole new worlds will open up to you.
When the humanity replaces fear with curiosity the best things can happen but when it allows anger to control fear then…
Religions become the basis for laws.
Weapons of mass destruction keep the peace.
Loving one another becomes a sign of weakness.
The volume of your voice dictates the size of your influence.
Knowledge and reason become heresy.
As humanity grows in size our propensity for doing great things becomes bigger than ever before but only if we assuage our primal emotion of fear triggered by arrogance and ignorance, and replace it with curiosity, understanding and courage.
Don’t give in…
The struggle…continues.
Brett