Category: Refuse to be Afraid

A century of progress

It was the most traumatic day of my professional life. After years of telling us that our competitor was the most evil of corporations, our newspaper’s owner had gathered us to announce he had sold his business to that same evil corporation. We had vowed we’d never work for those monsters, but here he was telling us that we were indeed working for them, as of midnight last night.

I was standing along the wall in a near panic. Should I run? Should I walk out of this room into an unknown but certainly better-than-this future?

As I was contemplating my many bad options, I glanced down and saw a colleague taking notes on a pad that had a cartoon and a saying at the top of the page.

“100 Years from now, none of this will matter,” it said.

I laughed.

It was a reminder not to take it all too seriously. It got me through that day and the ensuing years — the corporation wasn’t really that bad until a few years later, when nearly all of the old owner’s warnings proved true — but whenever times got tough, I remembered that in 100 years, none of this would matter.

But some of this will matter, won’t it, otherwise how is progress made? How do we help eagles and pelicans rebuild their numbers? How do we stop polio from killing kids? How do we know not to judge people based on the color of their skin or the way they worship or don’t? How do we end up treating each other with more love, kindness and respect, perhaps, than we treated each other 100 years ago?

Somewhere along the way, somehow, the message was exchanged — this little bit here, and that little bit there, they matter. “This is how you will be known, that you love one another.” With that imperative in mind, the way of things slowly but surely improves. Diseases are conquered, the needy get food and shelter, lives are extended with quality time. Yes, our worst instincts somehow prevail as well, but the best in us gets better.

It’s not always that obvious, because the worst of us have such loud voices and sometimes it seems as though evil is winning the day. But we each are capable of evil and good. And if we reach for the good answer to every conundrum and deliver ourselves from evil with the supernatural goodness that offers to help, we can resist the evil and move our lives forward, along with the lives around us.

Yes, 100 years from now, some of this will matter. The specific trials of today will be forgotten, including our names, but if we seek to do kindness and love, if we love one another, the world will be a kinder and more loving place.

From all I’ve learned, the world was baser a century ago, but people like us strove to make it better. We must maintain that pace.

Quiet

Quiet! Ye restless spirit that itches to jump into the fray. The bait is dangling right there — that foolish, ignorant, lying comment, that ridiculous meme just dying to be ridiculed, that — that thing that must not go unchallenged.

Quiet. What’s that expression, “Don’t feed the trolls”? One of the better memes out there says something like, “Life is too short to be spent arguing with strangers on the internet.”

But what if it’s no stranger? What if it’s a friend who posted something foolish, ignorant, or downright false? Now there’s a conundrum.

My humble advice is to pray. If you don’t believe in prayer, that’s another conversation, but for now, just contemplate and meditate on your friend’s words or deed. Then, check your facts. Is it really downright false? If so, speak the truth in love, gently. Is it really something worth risking a fight over? If so, speak the truth in love, gently. 

And if you can’t do it gently, with sincere love, well, then …

Quiet. Until you can.

We’re all gonna die

Another one from the archives — this one written under my old nom de plume B.W. Richardson and preserved here and in my first collection, Refuse to be Afraid.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.

Mark Twain

My eye was caught at the antique store by a thick, well-worn book titled “Modern Medical Counselor.” By its condition it was clear the book was anything but modern, and the price ($2) was right, so, figuring it would be an interesting excursion into the past, I brought it home.

What actually caught my attention was the section that I casually opened to, even before I brought the book home: “Survival in Atomic Bombing.” The copyright date of the book is 1951, so browsing through this book will be a traipse through an era where communism and nuclear death were our greatest fears.

With the knowledge of what was to happen in the next 70 years, we know the fears were largely unfounded. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still the only cities ever destroyed by atomic bombs. Although the great communist bogeyman reared his ugly head many times over the years, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics fell apart under the weight of its totalitarian follies and China has decided to try burying us the good old American way, by establishing government-subsidized monopolies.

In other words, the fear that was used as an excuse to impose on our liberties never came true. Communism and nuclear catastrophe did not destroy us.

Today, the fear is of small groups of terrorists (and “rogue nations”) with nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. The fear is that an influenza virus that kills birds will find a way to migrate into humans and cause a pandemic. The fear is that standing too close to a person smoking a cigarette will give you cancer. We can let those fears control us, we can let others use those fears to justify locking us into cages, or we can refuse to be afraid and live our lives as free men and women.

Here is the fear that lurks behind all of these fears: We are afraid to die. We are especially afraid to die before we experience a ripe old age.

Here is the truth: We all will die, some of us “before our time.” The real choice we all have: We can live and die as slaves, or we can live and die as free men and women.

Most of our lives we exist in the gray area between freedom and slavery, convincing ourselves that we are making our choices freely: When we hand the chains to our government and our bosses and our creditors, we rationalize that we are making a free decision to enslave ourselves. And it usually is a freely made choice — in the beginning.

Like Jacob Marley’s ghost, we accumulate shackles as we progress through life, usually out of fear — fear of poverty, fear of going hungry, fear of not having a reliable car. And the biggest fear of them all is the fear of death.

Accepting that you will die is the beginning of freedom. The title of the song “Live Like You’re Dying”  is its message.

These thoughts, especially as I relate them in a political context, could be misconstrued as advocating violent resistance against the slave masters. Nothing could be further from the truth. The revolution I advocate is an internal one:

Refuse to be afraid. Resist the impulse to yield to the fear and let someone strip your liberty in the name of security and protection. Live like you were dying — because you are dying, someday, so better to live free than in chains.