President Franklin Roosevelt is famous for the line, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." However, when he said it he spoke to an audience in the grip of the Great Depression, and was talking about America's fear of poverty.
However, in a different context today, his words about fear being our enemy ring with even more truth. With today's increasingly multicultural world fear still walks among us. On a campus with such a varied body of students and an emphasis on acceptance of diversity we may not feel like people are afraid of difference, but it runs deeper than we realize.
In the aftermath of 9/11 we saw certain Americans making bomb threats directed at mosques. Although we might want to dismiss such threats as merely some crazy person with a grudge, we need to realize instead that it represents a fundamental truth about human nature. When we are given something to fear, we start to generalize about who our enemies are, and then in turn feel the need to lash out like a wounded animal. All this despite the fact that many more peaceful Muslims were horrified by the terrible loss of life.
When we act in groups it gets even worse. The fear can become magnified and as group psychology kicks in people can be swept away into violence. People have realized this danger for a long time now. For example, Martin Luther King recognized the vital importance of peaceful protest in hopes of controlling the natural human response to fear and prevent further escalations of fear and violence from both sides of the civil rights conflict.
Fear of those who are different from us continues to thread its way through our society. It was not only the threat of "weapons of mass destruction" that drew us into the war in Iraq, but also the threat of those who are different from us and how they might use such weapons. That fear continues to color issues of immigration and how we feel the need to vigilantly patrol our borders. Fear continues to be present in the corners of the human mind, even when we think it is the last thing from our thoughts.
Roosevelt's famous phrase hints at the antidote for such fear, as he continued the rest of his phrase, "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." Nameless and unjustified terror is indeed unreasoning. Fear is perhaps the most powerful emotion in its capacity to paralyze our ability to think and reason out a situation, the very thing we need most desperately when facing fear.
The antidote for fear is knowledge. Although we know that will not take away all feelings of fear, knowing the reality of what you're afraid of often helps soften and diminish fear greatly. It is not so much what we see that frightens us, but what we do not see. In horror films when the camera moves away and we only see hints at what is really going on, our minds fill in the rest and that creates fear.
Likewise, fear is created by the unknown when it comes to dealing with other people. Fear of the foreigner, the alien, the other. We fear what we don't understand, or that which seems different from us. This is why people often lash out at that which is culturally or religiously different from what is considered mainstream culture. This is why it is so gratifying to me to hear about the continued efforts of universities to increase education about those who are different from ourselves, such as our own university which recently in an article in the Daily News reported a new class on Arabic studies. It is through the efforts of universities, and our efforts in turn to try to learn about others that we can hope to conquer racism, hatred and misunderstanding in our world.
The war on terror begins not out there, but right here, within us.
Write to Aaron at amfleming@bsu.edu
Read More
Three Air Jam teams take home the win
October 12, 2012Nineteen teams shimmied, shook and flipped for a sold out John R. Emens Auditorium on Thursday night during the 25th annual Air Jam.
Bill Clinton Speaks at North Central High School
October 12, 2012Former President's Speech Could Have Effect on State Senate Race
