COMMENTARY: GEORGE TEMPLETON
By George Templeton
Gazette Columnist
Shocking
Alvin Toffler’s 1970 bestseller “Future Shock,” describes a “roaring current of change … so powerful that it overturns institutions, shifts our values, and shrivels our roots.” By now we would be living in a “super-industrial revolution that would erase hunger, disease, ignorance, and brutality” where there would be cities under the sea, control of the weather, and genetically engineered intelligence. Social evolution takes place quickly, creating confusion and stress, while human nature retreats to a politics of nostalgia.
Fearless
Chronic fear of our fellow human beings erodes empathy and creates an everyman for himself environment. Our fears serve the private agendas of politicians and special interests, catering to their ambition and desire for power and creating an authoritarian world view that the nation has to be protected against insignificant things. Measures can be knowingly designed to alienate and divide us and to make us choose mutually suspicious sides. We see patterns in randomness when none exists, and we believe that the world is controlled by invisible agents. When a catastrophic event happens, everything is amplified assuming disproportionate significance. It is said that we are a consumer nation and if only we would spend, everything would be alright. We won’t spend when we fear the future. Anti-tax campaigner Grover Norquist says we must fear spending, but he does not mention that those who win buy low and sell high. We are funding 2,443 F35 jet fighters to protect us from an undefined enemy. Seven less would supply every first-grader with a tablet computer. The Republicans know that they will win as long as they can continue to manufacture paranoia.
Evil
Beware of politicians who speak of fear, of our “dangerous” president, and that Romney can never be elected because he does not adequately communicate hatred of “evil” liberals. Fear does not allow time for rational contemplation. It makes us impulsive and opens the door to revenge. Romney says we must be afraid of giving the President four more years ignoring our fear of Tea Party repression and demographic paranoia.
The sign at the Kuala Lumpur airport notifies arrivals that possession of a gun carries a mandatory death sentence. Guns are not the problem; people are! We could issue guns to all airline passengers along with peanuts so their right to defend themselves won’t be violated! The lyrics say: “Don’t take your guns to town, son. Leave your guns at home.” Contrary to the knight errant gunfighter myth, suspects are not fair game for the bullets of good guys. The proponents of amateur vigilante justice don’t feel safe unless they are packing iron on campus. When you act beyond your legal power and mistakenly kill, you are on your own and will be held responsible.
HB 2034 would outlaw the possession of Middle-Eastern hookah water pipes by those under 18, but tobacco is the problem, pipes aren’t!
Unfacts
We are entitled to our own beliefs but not our own facts. Fear mongers don’t care about facts. They manufacture their own to suit the situation. Governor Brewer speaks to us of drug war beheadings by cynically moving them across the border into the USA and claiming that all illegal immigrants work for drug lords. Sylvia Allen writes about tons of trash left by immigrants containing dead bodies and our government protecting terrorists and members of the drug cartel while intentionally providing them with illegal guns. Peggy Judd, R-Wilcox has heard that they set fires as a diversion. Sherriff Babeu received $1.7 million from our legislature to purchase night vision goggles, body armor, and machine guns for a desert show-down he anticipated even though his jurisdiction is at least 70 miles from the border. His deputy, Louie Puroll helped to fuel anti-immigration sentiment by falsely claiming that he was ambushed in the desert. HB 2586 creates an early warning system for invading legions marching across our border. That S600 million was appropriated in August of 2010 increasing the border agents from 10,000 in 2004 to 21,300 today, the heaviest staffing at any time in the border patrol’s 87 year history, is not mentioned. Nationwide apprehensions went down to 340,000 last year from 724,000 in 2008. At the same time 41 percent more drugs and 159 percent more weapons have been seized. Even so, Senate Bill 1083 will spend $1.45 million to put an Arizona armed guard at the border, challenging federal authority, and blurring lines of responsibility. Would tens of thousands of troops, razor wire, machine gun stations, and land mines make us feel secure? This frenzy makes reality intangible and fleeting, blurring our memory and promoting a short term focus on the mythical instead of the historical. Unfacts go beyond political dogma. They affect sanity and our ability to distinguish between illusion and reality.
Patriotism
Those who do not agree with the purveyors of hysteria are labeled unpatriotic or naïve, having the wrong world view. It is “us” versus “them” and “we” are on the side of good, fighting evil. Theocratic Islamic fundamentalism was the reason for the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Its roots can be found in the promotion of a righteous political vendetta. This masquerades as patriotism, leading to the belief that God is on our side. When this happens, intolerance comes out of hiding. We lack empathy, compromise justice, and lose the moral high ground.
Family Values
Successful fear mongers are well spoken, look good, and pretend to have our values. Different in any way would arouse suspicion. They communicate an aura of patriotic enthusiasm, confidence, religious conviction, and trustworthiness. Religious practice has traditional, historical, ceremonial, personal, political, and governmental nuances. Nobody prevents anybody from praying, but will we force Hindus to join in prayer to a Christian God? Our society includes devote individuals of many national origins and faiths. Even non-governmental prayers might seem arrogant to them. The American dream is not about those of other faiths burning in eternal hell!
Father Knows Best
Religious condemnation awaits the son or daughter who betrays a parent. HB2770 would protect conservatives from alleged liberal bias, discrimination, and persecution, insinuating that school administrators do not follow established policies. Daddy must prevent liberals from misleading college students! Unfortunately the perception of liberal bias is unavoidable, because facts differ from beliefs. There aren’t any scientifically recognized geologists who know that all the world’s strata are the result of the Biblical flood, or the biologist who denies the DNA evidence of evolution, or the mathematician who claims a radioactive exponential decay must reach zero to be correct, or the physicist who makes the speed of light in a vacuum variable in order to account for a 6000 year old universe. However, there is a Glen Beck who claims that Christians are being persecuted by liberals. He built an entire program wrongly on the assertion that liberals are atheists.
Shameful
Shame and fear unite when religion, sex, and politics become inseparable. Politicians avoid difficult questions by changing the subject to sex. Divine authority absolves all responsibility when the absolute truth is revealed and the politician’s ambitions and plans are thus approved. Moral absolutism knows that it is all very simple. Individual judgment, freedom, the situation, and context do not matter. On campus there is only one machine in the student health center that dispenses birth control. The morning after pill has the same physical chemistry as birth control according to Ron Paul. However, some feel that we should not make it possible to correct a mistake! A secular business owner will not provide health insurance offering birth control because it violates his individual personal religious beliefs. That’s intolerance, a lack of empathy, and religious repression of women who believe differently. Chinese intellectuals lecture about the openness of Confucianism to different religious beliefs and the importance of this to cooperation and global competition. Some of our best and brightest have left for China, feeling that the opportunities are better there.
Heroism
Conservatives claim that the layman knows the answer, not government, and Rick Santorum expounds on the snobbishness of educated elites who argue for the importance of education to global competitiveness. Teachers are demonized because they presumably hold the views of radical liberal university professors and union bosses. But do they? Did the common man agree to an unaffordable creative mortgage, take loans on their equity, and use plastic credit imprudently? These politicians win approval by praising us for being moral and heroic so that we don’t have to face up to the guilt that we would otherwise experience.
Infallibility
Job interviewers sometimes ask a candidate to critique themselves, talk about their own weaknesses and past decisions that could have been better made. This measures their sense of responsibility and forthrightness. Our politicians have been taught to never admit an error. We should not apologize when we burn the Quran. That would be a sign of weakness. The Afghans must apologize to us!
Dangerous Secrets
Merchants of fear are advocates of surveillance and the collection of data about their countrymen though they are reluctant to disclose information about themselves. We are afraid of other religions, cultures and languages. We conduct hearings and surveillance of the followers of Islam, threatening them. Rick Santorum seems to think that there is only one correct and non-controversial religion when he refers to our President’s “phony theology”. He ignores the many denominations that differ in beliefs, and the long history of controversial movements such as the social gospel, liberation theology, and faith-based initiatives.
Connotation
Fear mongers rely on a lexicon of emotional words. They promote flights of fantasy and pure conjecture. America’s greatness depends on its honesty, sincerity, respect for others, love and generosity, instead of fear, envy, and hatred. How we take care of our elderly, weak, and poor matters. Hard work, open-mindedness, humility, modesty, accountability and responsibility are its measures.
Courage
Government is “We the People.” Courage is not just one of our virtues but it is the form of every virtue at the critical moment when we must not yield to fanaticism and reject the truth.
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