"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

The words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt from his first inaugural address in 1933, meant to help restore the courage and character of an American population struggling with the greatest economic depression the nation had known since its birth. Many people don't understand the meaning, but understanding its meaning is the key to remaining a free nation.

I'm sure many people, not knowing when the words were spoken, believed the words were spoken in reference to the pending war with the Axis powers of World War II, but obviously that is not so. In 1933 Hitler was still in the process of consolidating power in Germany and Europe, and had not yet annexed Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland or marched on Poland. Japan had expanded to Southeast Asia, but a racist nation had little interest in the affairs of orientals as long as it didn't really impact its own affairs.

No, FDR's words were referring to the fear of poverty, and the problems that such fear would pose to the nation. If the wealthy individuals who still had money hoarded it, the economy could not recover. If protectionist tariffs remained in place on foreign goods to protect American manufacturers, then retaliatory tariffs by the nations affected would cost the jobs of Americans producing trade goods intended for markets in those nations. Fear would have consumed us in a spiral of recession from which we would not have recovered, and in fact we didn't, until a war gave our nation a need to redevelop our production capacity and gave all Americans a job. It also united the nation, causing selfish fear to be replaced by selfless courage.

Having taken so long to introduce this point, why do I dredge it up now? The Great Depression is over, FDR is dead, we won the war...what's the big deal?

Because we are again afraid, and if we don't rediscover our courage then it will rob us of what we hold most dear as Americans: our freedom.

Sounds dire, doesn't it? Well, let me just add that we most often learn by example, and the example we're teaching our children right now is that if you're afraid of something happening, repress the people you think are most likely to cause it.

But that's the warning of how this problem could spiral out of control, not the symptoms of the problem itself. First, let me remind people that it's happened before. Fear has led to the suppression of the rights of Americans not just in our history, but in our recent history, in the last 100 years. Remember McCartyism? One U.S. Senator managed to lead one of the largest suppression movements in our history because he was afraid of communists managing to launch a revolution in this nation, in the wake of which all our rights would be quashed. So to protect us from this, anyone who opposed Senator McCarthy or his fear-led movement had their rights quashed. Fair exchange, heh?

Well, now we have a different problem. We no longer have one fear, but instead are a nation consumed by fear. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the current situation in our nation's school systems. Our attention focussed on our schools in 1999 when two boys from Columbine High School, tired of years of abuse and ostracization by their peers, neglected by parents and community, made to fear that they didn't fit in and understanding that adults usually just accept that some children deserve to be picked on for being different as long as it's not their own child, decided to end it all and take as many of the people that caused their pain with them. I'm going to say here what no one else has the courage to admit: we allowed them to be victimized, and when they resisted we villainized them. Naturally, I villainize them too, but that's another essay on character, which I haven't written yet. But this essay is about fear, which I will now arrive at.

Klebold and Harris changed our world. They committed the worst act of in-school violence in our known history, and yet, instead of banishing them from memory like they deserve, we immortalize their memory by allowing them to have a continuous impact upon our nation's schools, exactly what they wanted. In the wake of this act of violence and the follow-up copycat crimes, plus the random acts of school violence that were likely already occurring before this and now are always publicized to help drive our fear, we have stripped our children of any semblance of their rights.

Bold? Well, I came to this conclusion upon reading a news article about a 9-year old boy in Stuart, Florida, who, no kidding, was arrested and charged with aggravated assault for committing the heinous crime of chasing other students around in the playground with a TOY GUN. I'm not kidding. Now, I don't know where he got the gun, but I do know one thing: if it was purchased in the past decade, it bore no resemblance to a real gun. Given that this child is only nine, I would guess that the toy was not purchased before 1992. I don't recall the actual year of passage, but I believe it was in the late 80s that a law banning the sale of realistic toy guns was passed. I know, because I played with toy guns, had some of the ones that were accurate reproductions of real guns, and I was angry when the law was passed. Again, it was passed out of fear when a single child, one child, was mistakenly shot at by a police officer, himself overly afraid of what would happen to him while he responded to an incident in a black neighborhood. Fear caused the officer to react without thinking of possible consequences, shooting to death a very young boy who was just playing. Fear then caused panicked adults to demand a law banning all realistic toy guns, denying them to all the other children in the nation who really stood little chance of being shot by police. You can debate the merit of this all you like, but it boils down to one thing: fear of what could happen caused the passage of a law that made illegal something that had been legal since since its invention probably over a century before (anyone know the history of toy guns and when they were introduced?).

I admit, I've digressed...my point is that the toy gun likely was not very real in appearance, the child's age was still in single digits, he was doing something that once wasn't too uncommon, and now he isn't just in trouble, he didn't just visit the principal and stay after school, he was arrested and charged with a crime far more serious than what he did. If convicted by the typically unmerciful Florida judge, the boy will never recover. Aggravated assault will likely cause him to miss a year of school, which will have to be made up. He will forever be ostracized by the "good kids" in school, taking up with the "rough crowd", and he'll inevitably get in trouble with the law again. He was already tending toward that behavior, and instead of dealing with him, he was neglected, perhaps punished, and now, due to adult overreaction, he is now being sacrificed so that other parents can feel safe.

This is not an isolated case. After the Columbine High School incident any child found to have simply talked about or written an act of violence was arrested and run up on trumped up charges to help make us feel safe. A news article reveals that parents of the Columbine massacre have gone even further, criticizing the police in Littleton Colorado for not arresting Klebold and Harris before the commission of their crime because of a paper they wrote and a web page they created, neither of which actually detailed the massacre, incidentally. While accurately identifying the police department's failure to stop the crime in progress (another unwritten but related essay topic, Police work should be harder and higher risk, and they should be paid for it), but then suggests that the police should have violated the Constitutional rights of the two boys to stop the crime no one knew was coming. If this crime was so predictable, then why did none of the boys' classmates, who apparently spent more time around the boys than their own parents, reveal to a parent that they were afraid of the two, or that they knew they were "up to something?" Why did no classmate say he or she was afraid to go to school because of "those creepy boys who will probably kill everyone." Why did the boys' friends, who had heard the two talk about committing such a crime, not believe they would actually act upon it? No, this was not a predictable crime, but in the wake of it, parents of the victims and those sympathetic to them are willing to allow the government to police our thoughts, and make it a crime to appear threatening. The parents of the victims have their grief to blame for this, but what's your excuse? The same excuse everyone has for wanting to suppress the freedom of speech: fear of the unknown.

"But, they wrote about violence!" Should we then lock up every person who ever wrote a novel? The vast majority of fiction contains some description of an act of violence. "But they weren't writing novels." Well, neither was a friend of mine in High School who spoke about getting revenge at the end of the school year, even bought an AK-47 (second-hand) from someone he knew. But, you know what? He bought the gun because he thought it was cool, and he spoke of violence just because he wanted people who knew him to be a little afraid and act nicer, not because he actually had any intent. It was his way of blowing off steam. So what happened? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. He didn't even bring it up at the time when he was supposed to carry out his revenge. After all, he never intended to. Let me tell you more about him. His mother once asked me where he was by using the phrase, "Where's f**khead?" Such sentiment wasn't out of the ordinary for this relatively worthless woman. He didn't graduate from High School on time due to failing grades (actually a smart individual, but lazy), he was fired from jobs, took to drinking too much at parties, got kicked out of an apartment for being such a slob that the place was a health risk...but he still hasn't commit an act of violence or turned in any way toward a criminal life. And I respect him not only for that, but for simply having the character to not quit in life. Maybe someday he'll figure it out and turn his life around. He's got the brains, he's got the character, he only lacks the drive. The only thing that holds him back is his own will. But, all in all, he's a very good person.

My point in relating the story of this High School friend of mine is that, under the current mentality in the schools today, despite never having done anything to anyone, he'd have been arrested as a threat to his classmates' safety and thrown in prison. He would no longer have the option of turning his life around because the system would have worked against him. A good person would have been sacrificed because his own form of self-therapy scared some people. Without the commission of any act, today's parents would have demanded he be removed from school, locked in a cage without a trial, a thus be removed as a potential threat to society.

Speaking of the effects of fear on our society has proven a very long task, so it will be continued at another time. Hopefully, though, you will already see the point I'm making. Our fear is causing us to be willing to remove our own rights, and removal of our rights is a suppression of our freedom. It's a dangerous precedent that will only continue. So, to wrap up this essay, I'll leave you with something to think about:

Does your home state require you to wear a seat belt in your car? If so, what real harm could you possibly bring to someone else by not wearing your own seatbelt? If, by some ridiculous chance you find an answer to that question, what is the chance of it happening?

Friday, May 18, 2001

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©All material on this site written by Alan J. Cadmus. If you wish to reprint any of it, credit must be given to me, and you must first ask me for permission. E-mail address is on main page.