Freedom from fear -- the lost freedom

I've been thinking a lot about fear lately. It's impossible not to think about it if you spend more than a few minutes watching cable TV news. In fact, so far in 2015 I've probably watched cable news less than any time in the newish millennium. Why? Maybe it's the incessant coverage of "the ISIS threat" or "the war on ISIS" or whatever The Graphics Department is calling it this week.

Look, I agree with you that the 20,000 or so thugs in ISIS are the worst people in the world -- using extreme violence to deprive people of their freedom and impose their warped religious ideas on others is indeed as low as it gets. And they are causing instability in a region where -- despite decades of warning that this is a dumb idea -- a lot of the industrialized world gets its oil. But the violence caused in that same region by Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad didn't seem to pose an existential threat to the United States or to CNN's producers. Nor did rampant genocide, rape and use of child soldiers in Africa -- in other words, ISIS without the oil.

But ISIS and its tabloid-ready beheading tactics does have the effect -- for better or worse -- of extending America's regime of fear. As long as the fear factor is in effect, after all, America has all the excuse it needs to keep its troops and drones in Iraq and other regions of the Middle East. As long as the fear factor holds, America will continue to spend more on its military than the other major nations of the world combined. As long as the FBI continues its inane headline-generating entrapment operations against young losers and the mentally ill, as long as CNN treats three teenaged girls on a bus bound for Syria as it if they were a missing "suitcase nuke," America can -- and will -- be governed by fear.

Today, I read a speech given recently by one of my heroes, a Philadelphian named John Raines, an 80-year-old retired religion professor from Temple. It was Raines who -- it was revealed just last year -- along with his wife Bonnie and others, led thet raid that liberated boxes of documents from an FBI office in suburban media and proved massive illegality by law enforcement against political dissenters. Their exploits were the subject of a best-selling book, The Burglary, and now a documentary called "1971" that's going to be opening in Bryn Mawr on Friday.

I was struck by what Raines had to say about the role of fear in American politics -- here's an excerpt:

The terrorists and the anti-terrorists are two foxes tied together by the tail. They sing the same music and dance the same dance. Both of them depend upon successfully making us feel afraid. Both run on the same gasoline—the endless black hole called fear.

But here's a truth we often ignore. Mostly I don't act like I'm afraid, and neither do you. I wake up in the morning, get on the bus and go to work without once thinking, "is the bus driver a mass kidnapper in disguise?" Of course not! It would be an absurd over-reach of suspicion. I take for granted, we all take for granted, and must take for granted our common safety in public spaces. That is the Common Grace, that is the gift each of us gives to each other, a presumed safety that welcomes us every morning as we leave our front door.

But precisely such an overreach of suspicion has in recent years become the driving force of our federal budget. The price we pay for that, both financially and psychologically, is that we increasingly live and agree to live in what has come to be called "the surveillance state." Think of all the pay checks, all the personal and institutional ambitions that depend upon us feeling afraid. It's not just The National Security Agency or The Central Intelligence Agency or The Federal Bureau Of Investigation; it's all those other intelligence units in the military, in local police departments, and the massive spread into private industry of profits made from intelligence work. They all drink at the well of fear, and the rest of us pay the price for that. The money that should be going into our schools, the money that should be repairing our old and broken infrastructure, the money that should go into developing sustainable sources of energy, and the money that could and should be used to end the practice of sending out our college graduates as indentured servants—all that money instead disappears into the endless and ill-defined land called fear.

Once upon a time, we had political leaders who fought fear instead of embracing it. I'm thinking especially of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who not only famously calmed Depression-frayed Americans by telling them the only thing they had to fear was fear itself -- "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance" -- but who later made "Freedom from Fear" a cornerstone of his 1941Four Freedoms speech.

FDR probably would have been terrible for cable TV news ratings.