Cowards!

I’ve been a coward all my life. Afraid of bullies. Afraid of pain. Afraid of being embarrassed or humiliated. Afraid of being abandoned. Afraid of being sick. Afraid of loving someone because everyone I loved had hurt me. That last bit was true until I was about 14. That summer I worked with my neighbor Larry. He didn’t hurt me. And I miss him. My first true adult friend from a time when I was a cowardly little kid.

Fear is partially ingrained in our minds, our innate selves. The other parts we have to learn ourselves. I once burned a finger and though very little, I of course learned to fear fire and high heat. I learned even earlier to fear my father. I remember riding a tricycle and he wanted me to come up and sit on his lap. I cried. I seem to have cried pretty loud. Like screaming, until he let me down. You know how you get fear like that. Yes, you do.

Fear as a conditioned response and fear of ordinary things like the darkness of night are very different things. But the mechanisms in the response end up feeling exactly the same. Fear sucks, we hate it. Unless, of course, we can experience it in a controlled way. Like watching a horror movie, reading a Stephen King novel. And sometimes, even that’s too much. If the input causing the fear response becomes too intense, we are no longer in control. We put the book down and sleep with the lights on. We walk out of the theatre. It’s okay; it happens all the time. Hollywood has test screenings to see how audiences respond. From the responses, they may make additional cuts before releasing the film to theatres worldwide.

When the first print of the original King Kong was test screened, the scene where men fell into a chasm and were eaten by spiders caused people to get up and make for the exits in haste. That scene didn’t make it to the original theatrical release. It was later restored, and the Jack Black film has that scene, but on crack and steroids and shrooms. I guess things are different now.

The original Frankenstein with Boris Karloff has a scene where the monster is watching a little girl throw flowers onto the surface of a lake. They’re pretty flowers. So the monster, thinking the girl is pretty, picks her up and throws her into the water. She drowns. Test audiences found the scene too disturbing. It was cut and only years later, restored.

Fear causes other responses from the”fight or flight” reaction to trauma to anger, unreasoning and thirsty for revenge.

But fear is healthy most of the time. It keeps us safe. We check our own emotions and hold our tongues for fear of starting a fight, getting arrested, losing a friend. Proper fear is good.

And fear has nothing to do with cowardice. Being scared enough to avoid pain or run from a fight is actually a pretty brave thing. John Wayne defined courage as being scared to death but getting in the saddle anyway. Sometimes, though, the right thing to do is to not get up in the saddle. It’s down to judgement and perhaps something as arbitrary as how we feel, physically and mentally, at the time. If we’re not up to it, then that’s okay. Maybe we need help. Maybe, some time. Everyone is different. Fear remains the same.

HYSTERIA, STRESS, ANXIETY AND THEIR TERRIBLE CONSEQUENCES

The one thing fear does, especially when coupled with a mental illness such as PTSD, that is not productive or desirable, is to cripple us. Everyday tasks, the most ordinary things, like going out to get the mail, become impossible. We’ve ceased to be afraid and we have become prisoners of anxiety and stress. It’s never good. Some can work through it; most will need treatment, such as drug and talk therapy. We need a support system and coping skills. We’ve learned behaviour that keeps us disabled. It is a bad place to be. Without treatment, people typically self-medicate, using illegal substances and alcohol. It’s tough to save them at that point, and you can beg someone to seek help, but they won’t do it unless they choose to do so.

But there’s another kind of abnormal fear, and often it is not seen for what it is. By the time anyone knows, something terrible has usually happened. Intense fear can only be tolerated for so long. The imperative becomes not quelling that fear, but acting on it. Instead of being a paralytic, it causes radical behavior fueled by anger. The need to stop the source of the thing causing that fear. The need for control.

I knew a man. His neighbor was a Holocaust survivor. Now, back then, in Pasadena, Maryland, and a few surrounding areas, Neo-Nazis were growing in number. They put flyers in mailboxes to recruit, and at the time this was not a hate crime in Maryland. They would also put anti-Semitic messages in the mailboxes of Jewish people. This man, he was old. He was old enough to have seen and to remember seeing the unimaginable. Stuff that even footage can’t convey. He would read these flyers, go inside his house, and get a baseball bat, come back out and beat his galvanized steel mailbox into an unrecognizable chunk of metal lying on the ground next to a steel pole.

I’d say that was a perfectly understandable and healthy response. Action from fear, action fueled by rage.

But what if people drift toward such responses when they are not healthy and not normal? That desire, that need to act, to end the fear and by immediate association helplessness, can take a horrific turn.

That’s when you get something like this. The article tells all there is to know, but make no mistake here; it should never have happened. How it ever became legal to bear arms in the capital building is beyond my ability to comprehend. But more to the point is, people’s fear of the COVID-19 virus had overloaded radicals who went into action out of anger. Their fear of catching or spreading the virus was gone. In its place, rage. Radical groups have a group mentality in the first place. Otherwise, no group. The scariest ones go “paramilitary” and buy all sorts of weapons, including assault weapons and handguns, and sure enough, many are owners of bunkers. You don’t even have to dig your own and line it with sandbags anymore. They’re sold, already made, ready for installation. They include air vents and a locking access hatch. They’ll customize almost any feature you can imagine.

I’ll grant you, the Michigan protesters are radicals already predisposed to a simmering mistrust of authority. And if measures are not taken, one of them will surely pull the trigger before this is over, initiating a firefight in which law enforcement and the radicals would both take casualties. Such a thing will not get anyone back to work, or get any mall reopened. It will be an event that can change the country in ways these radicals will not appreciate.

Being fair about it, I’d have to admit that the Michigan protesters are in no way representative of the majority here. But they’ve managed to prove two things.

The first is that they’re self-serving and wrongly feel entitled and use “civil rights” as a shield. They cannot tough it out with the rest of us. They’re cowards in the truest sense. Too cowardly to hang in there until we can see social distancing really work properly. Cowards. They cannot bear to do what the rest of us do, no matter how scared we are. Courage, said John Wayne, is being scared, but doing the right thing anyway.

The second thing these protesters did is more serious. They may not have broken the law when they entered the capital building armed. That’s true. But to do it in anger and cause the government workers inside to don bulletproof vests, and fear for their lives, is terrorism.

We’re all worried. Scared. We’ve been traumatized by untimely unfair deaths. We’ve lost jobs. It’s a disaster.

I wake up from nightmares you can’t imagine and realize my kids are dead and I’m all alone. But I live with my bipolar and my PTSD and I take my meds and I care so much about other people that my problems vanish on hearing someone else’s story. So I ask: are you as tough as I am? Can you hang with me? Can you do better than I can? Or are you going to admit to yourself, and prove to the world, that you’re really just a fucking coward with a gun who needs to scare the shit out of others to feel like you’re in control?

You choose.