When we live despite the urge to fear

[Drawn from the archives, June 17, 2020 – now THAT was a year! Also reprinted in Echoes of Freedom Past, one of my 2022 books.]

Fear is an ugly thing. It contorts the face, boils the gut, and manifests in every unhealthy emotion – anger, worry, hatred. Fear can spread across the land, a virus more deadly than any microbe.

“Fear is the mind-killer,” Frank Herbert wrote: It robs us of our reason, strips love and compassion from our hearts, and brings out the monster in us.

The children of fear are slavery, tyranny and war.

When we overcome fear, we rise.

When we rise, we turn our faces to the sun.

When we turn our faces to the sun, we begin to live. The sun nourishes, warms, gives life to the dying. Without the sun, we die in darkness.

When we live despite the urge to fear, without loathing, without anger and hatred and all of that – when we stand instead of cowering, in other words – our spirits become invincible.

When our spirits are invincible, we have no need for the darkness.

The spirit of love is fragile and beautiful and strong and powerful all at once. It takes courage to shout love at the heart of darkness, but it’s lighter, more free, an antidote for terror, and healthier for the soul.

An ounce of love is more powerful than tons of gunpowder. Love slices souls more surely than the sharpest knife. Fear is a poison; love an elixir.

I would say that I loathe fear, and I do, but loathing is a byproduct of fear and the world has enough loathing.

Better to say that in my most sane moments, I set the anger and the hatred and the anxiety aside, burying them in a place where I am free to love and to live and to laugh and to cry with joy.

Unworthy premise, worthy advice

I was, as is my wont, listening to 1960s pop music on SiriusXM when Dusty Springfield’s “Wishin’ and Hopin’” came on.

I was struck by how outdated the song’s premise was — here’s Dusty dispensing advice about how to become the possession of a man: “Ladies, you have to be doing more than wishing and hoping and praying; you have to take action if you want to be his.”

“Show him that you care just for him, do the things he likes to do, wear your hair just for him.”

And then, of course, once you get close enough, “all you gotta do is hold him and kiss him and squeeze him and love him. Yeah, just do it and after you do, you will be his.”

It’s somewhat unnerving that someone would sing a song about how to be owned by a man, but as I pondered that, it suddenly occurred to me that this is actually quite a good formula for accomplishing anything.

For one thing, it’s true that you definitely will not achieve your goals just by wishing, hoping, thinking and/or praying about it. You have to do something!

You have to show that you care about doing this, and you have to change your behavior in ways that are likely to get it done. And keep going, in more and more intimate detail, until you’ve done it.

Hopefully you’re going for a more worthy goal than becoming a plaything for a member of the opposite sex. As 1960s sensibilities go, I am more in tune with the sentiment of “You Don’t Own Me.” But I must say that Ms. Springfield is definitely insightful in her assessment of what you need to do to achieve your goals.

What it was like

One of my favorite memories is the first time I saw Casablanca. It was around 1972 and I was in a college lecture hall with around 200 other students. In those days before DVDs and Blu-Rays or even before VHS and Beta, almost no one in the big crowd had ever seen the film before.

The audience was completely into the story, and at the climax when Louis told his minions, “Major Strasser has been shot!” we all held our breath with Humphrey Bogart. At Louis’ next words — I’m not going to spoil them for the sake of the three people who still haven’t seen Casablanca — the crowd erupted in the biggest cheer I’ve ever heard in a movie theater.

The other day Facebook Memories showed me something I posted 11 years ago, in 2012: “We pulled out Raiders of the Lost Ark tonight, and it’s still true – best adventure movie ever, best hero ever, best heroine ever. Thirty (!) years later, it’s still a wonderful ride.”

I would annoy Red with comparisons like this one: “If, when ‘Good Vibrations’ was new, the radio played songs that are as old as ‘Good Vibrations’ is now, they’d be playing ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart’ from 1910 on an old Victrola.”

So of course I did the math. When I wrote that 2012 musing, Raiders of the Lost Ark was just as old as Casablanca was when I saw it for the first time.

I was born in the waning days of the Korean War, and of course I have no memory of those times. There are adults alive today for whom the events of Sept. 11, 2001, are similar — it’s history that happened before they were aware.

I think we relics from another era owe it to those young adults to try to explain what it was like. It helps me to understand, both the generation that preceded me and those that have come after, to reflect on what the world was or is like when I was their age — I’m now older than my parents were on 9/11, for example.

What movies today are as old as Casablanca was back in 1972? Schindler’s List. Jurassic Park. Groundhog Day. Feeling old yet?