Fear is not a foreign concept to me. Most of my young life I feared the reality that someday I would go blind. I have been either mostly blind or as long as I can remember I have battled, ignored, and tried not to accept what was inevitable. I learned that you can’t run away from your fears, eventually you have to stop, turn around and face them head on. The lights finally went out for me some time ago, there was a time I marked that phase as a free man in a sighted world, maybe like a prisoner on death row counting the days until my life ended as I knew it. Those days are long gone now and I am well into my life sentence. Before you go getting all worked up over the metaphor, I would encourage you to read on because this is not a story of pain and suffering, it is a story of liberation, of self-determination and of realizations that never would have happened if my life didn’t unfold exactly the way in which it did. If you have ever been to the homepage of this website, you are greeted with a saying that is my personal mantra, the words I wake up to each and every day, the words that define me:
"The only true freedom we have in this life is how we choose to react to any given situation."
I must have read that thousands of times. Thousands in the beginning because those words touched me, I didn’t know why, so I put them away, filed them in that folder in my brain. Over the years, I dusted that file off, read it over and over again until one day, back in the late 90’s it made its début on the first website I ever designed. It was the Alpha to the Omega in my mind, the beginning of my new life versus what I believed perhaps was the end only to discover that it in fact was the beautiful beginning to a brand-new life, a fresh start, a re-birth.
It is in the darkest hours of our life that we discover who we truly are, what exactly we are capable of and just how we chart a course out of the grasp of our individual purgatory, our rock bottom. During my journey, I learned a great deal about the concept of fear, the role it plays in our life, how it taints our landscape, skews our view making what seems possible, impossible. I would like to propose something, that fear is not personal, it is a tool cleverly hidden and deployed strategically by perpetrators in our lives to motivate us towards a specific end. In 1999 to 2001 I spent time researching a book and then writing said book. In searching for a title, I settled on “Conspiracy of Fear.” It was a work of fiction dealing with America’s internal struggle over the 2nd Amendment. To the casual reader the book would appear to deal with that singular topic. However, when I wrote the book, I used the single topic to introduce an overall theme. That theme, the message of that book had little to do with 2nd Amendment rights and more to do with the use of “Fear” as a vehicle towards forced social change. The kind of change that doesn’t come from a mandate from the government, but one that appears on the surface to come from the people themselves.
The purpose for this piece us not to alarm people by saying that there is in fact a conspiracy of fear afoot. It is simply to inform reasonable people that fear can be healthy as well as unhealthy. It is easy during this time of quarantine and social distancing to allow fear to serve as a motivator or rationale for becoming stuck, intransigent and/or paralyzed. My caution is to follow your own God given common sense rather than listening to and following the admonition of the fear mongers among us who in the end will twist this into something that it is not. As a parent of adult children, about the only teaching I have left to do comes from the wisdom of a life lived as well as offering perspective. I do not want to minimize anything nor do I want to come off as insensitive, however, I do feel a little perspective needs to be injected into our new reality. As of the time I am writing this, there are slightly under 2 million cases of this virus worldwide. The number of deaths worldwide are 125,445. The number of those who have been documented as “Recovered” is 466,606. These numbers are based on a worldwide population of 7,655,957,366. For those who are math challenged like I am and can’t make sense of the commas in numbers that means over 7.5 billion people. However, perspective does have another vantage point. The Anesthesiologist present during the birth of my daughter and my son is currently in a coma, on a ventilator, suffering from this virus. One of my wife’s good friends from work has a grandmother recently diagnosed with the virus. Even though these realities differ when applied personally, I still believe what we can’t afford as a society or as individuals is to make the cure worse than the actual virus. Remember that this too shall end and a reckoning will follow. Will you have given up more of your life and liberty in the name of fear? Or will you see the reality of the power of a conspiracy of fear as it is wielded by the unsrupulous, those bent on social engineering? As my father told me, something that his father had told him, “Common sense is not a flower that blooms in every garden.” Tend to your flower, and don't allow this or anything to let it wither and die. Read again the mantra on this website, the one that rules my life today, “The only true freedom we have in this life is how we choose to react to any given situation.” I would call this time, this virus and the media coverage surrounding it something that qualifies as a “given situation” in each and every one of our lives. My question is, how will you choose to react? Will you remain in your bubble, your echo chamber, your comfort zone? Or, will you step outside those cocoons and see this for what it is and not what the Zeitgeist dictates to you? As for me, my mind is open, rationale rules my thoughts rather than the emotions of the day and I destroyed my echo chamber, my bubble, my comfort zone long, long ago. Am I afraid? Hell yes, anybody who isn’t is lying. But will that fear rule my life, no way.
**Picture description is the word “Fear” in white neon digital on a black background
