Dismantling a culture of fear

She stood with waving strawberry tresses, gazing onto the field of last week's football victory with an attractive reticence and contagious grin. I'm a talker -- for those who know me, getting me to shut up is like asking President George W. Bush to do calculus -- but I couldn't utter a word; a paralytic fear locked me up as only my eyes darted to see her reactions. But before a few minutes ended, she was gone. Evaporating into the crowd, she vanished into the impenetrable night before I could utter a word, spit any game, drop any digits, work any Warnke wizardry or even get an "857." Basically, we are all afraid of something, but, in recent days, our government has proven itself to be a conniving catalyst in the spreading of this state-sponsored fear. \nTake for example George W. Bush's preemptive/unilateral doctrine of foreign policy which strides arrogantly over diplomacy and mushrooms the fear of terror through red, orange and periwinkle alerts. Perhaps Bush is the best man to embody 2004 America, embodying the zeitgeist of American hubris. Case in point, the horrible fear of Saddam Hussein: the butcher of Baghdad, the bloody tyrant, the murdering dictator who aides terrorists, a man who (as Bush told us daily in speeches) used weapons against his own people. Well, to be clear, he used those weapons on his own people when Bush's daddy was president and he didn't seem too concerned then. The current foreign policy logic tells us that if you are a repressive government who might-kinda-used-to-maybe-have-had-some-sorta-quasi-semi-pseudo-weapons of mass destruction possibly-maybe-plausibly-probably-ten years ago, you are an imminent threat to U.S. national security. However, if you are a government whose current and immediate genocidal policies have killed 30,000 people and left 1.2 million homeless in 19 months (as in the Sudan) you should ask help not from the U.S. but from the "international community" because America is (all together now) not the world's policeman. \nAmerica woke up on Sept. 11, 2001 and found itself in the desert of the real. Terror and fear became more than blurbs on CNN, they became real, tangible, alive. We fear what we don't know. But since the calamity, cities continue sprawling and no one knows their neighbors. We fear what we don't know. But beneath this life we find a river of fear -- daily there are terror warnings, Chechen rebels unleashed, vivid images of riots, plumes of smoke rising from office buildings and the vice president telling you that people from the other side of the Congressional aisle will make you less safe even though the worst terrorist act in recent history occurred under his watch. \nNoble laureate William Faulkner once wrote that "Humanity is not so eak n dtimorous as to need to be free from fear; we need only use our capacity not to be afraid of it and releagate fear to its proper perspective."\nThe average American in post-Sept. 11 America seems to know more about Axle Rose from the VH1's "Behind the Music" or the chubby naked gay guy from Survivor than they do about their own co-workers, neighbors or lovers. Perhaps the fear that broaches Americans stems from this depersonalization -- this culture of fear. Fear is the new lever that moves the world. \nIt seems all my values in beliefs in our system of government are vanishing spectrally into the shadows of fear like my regretful lost love at the football game, never to return. Had I stood up with a burnished calm upon my face and unwavering confidence I might have gotten a date. And if the American people voice their will on Election Day, America need not be the hated and isolated dragon besieged in a wall of fear. There may still be hope for an America who can be free from manufactured fear and be able to walk in the world proudly but not arrogantly, steadily but not swaggeringly, highly but not haughtily, humbly but not afraid.