Governed by Fear

People don’t make great decisions when their primarily motivations are based on fears, particularly if such fears are unjustifiable. The number one motivation of recent American policy seems to be fear, however, enhanced by a vast body of Americans who truly believe that they have lost their standard of living and quality of life forever, all because of “others” that we need to fear. Start with a couple of basic premises, and you will begin to understand the magnitude of what has become a fear-driven America. Terrorists do not succeed unless they instill terror, until they change the way their enemies think and act. If they scare us, they win.

Still, we have fought two major wars, have created the Department of Homeland Security, which, with about 200,000 employees, is the third largest cabinet government agency in the federal government out of fear. Of that mass of bodies and overlapping jurisdiction with other agencies – particular the Department of Justice – there are about 60,000 TSA agents, most of whom are working at airports and harbors checking travelers. Feel safer when you travel? Do you really believe a dedicated terrorist can’t get through that screening procedure?

We are never going to be able to stop small groups of extremists from figuring out how to infiltrate and inflict explosions or other violent acts. When your chances of getting hit by a bus are vastly higher than your being killed by a terrorist act, how many trillions of dollars, disruptions of your lifestyle and profound detriment to our tourism industry when we need the money, is this really worth to you? We could ban cars, trucks and busses from the roads and saving hundreds of thousands of lives from traffic fatalities! What percentage of your income are you personally willing to commit to pay for the extra military and Homeland Security agents to make you feel better about security? Even if it doesn’t work? Even if virtually no other modern nation on earth applies the same level of security at its airports and harbors? How much deficit came from fear-based decision-making?

We are also terrified of immigrants, which is particularly strange in a country that was actually built by immigrants. Even though the jobs at the bottom end of immigration generally encompass work no American would do under any circumstances, we actually want to stop those people from working! Even when innocent children of undocumented workers who have lived here all their lives rise to the academic top, we have debates about whether or not they should be permitted to stay. We make it exceptionally difficult for well-trained immigrants, particularly if they do not have while skin, to move to the U.S. these days, and even when we see the wisdom of allowing their expertise into the country, we make it almost impossible for their wives and kids to join them. Here’s a strange fact that no one seems to remember when immigration debate hits. Japan and most of Western Europe is getting increasingly dominated by older workers and retirees at the expense of younger people entering the market, and their safety nets will have insufficient workers to cover the graying population. We’d be in that same boat but for… immigration!

We are absolutely terrified by Muslims, thinking that they are all extremists ready to kill us at a moment’s notice. That India has 180,000 Muslims, and there has never been one single Indian national identified with al Qaeda is a fact most of Americans would like to ignore… assuming that they know the fact. Why aren’t we using American Muslims to help understand and defeat Islamic fundamentalists who mean to do us harm? Why do we care where they build their houses of worship? Why does a religion scare us so much when moderate Muslims have been such good citizens for years? Test yourself. Does the picture above give you any discomfort?

We also dread Iran, on the other side of the world, so much so that we threaten and cajole the world to encircle them with sanctions and openly talk about how we can effect regime change. If someone huge threatened us with sanctions and regime change, think we might want to have some nuclear deterrents on hand? We talk about the danger of nuclear weapons, but we have one of the greatest nuclear arsenals on earth, and we are doing very little to eliminate it. Aren’t we pretty much mandating that Iran get its nukes and delivery systems up to snuff?

We are absolutely terrified of competition, even though Americans pay lip-service to being a competitive capitalist state. We want China to adjust its currency because we cannot compete with their pricing. Because Canada has got its healthcare in order (a whole lot cheaper than the average cost in the U.S.), their skilled labor is the same as ours, but because they can supply healthcare “insurance” for about $800/year and our private system costs about $6500 for the same level worker, skilled car-making jobs have scooted off to Canada at the expense of Michigan and other rust-belt states.

We’re even more terrified of losing our jobs in this country, because in the U.S. healthcare comes with employment, so if you lose your job, healthcare benefits soon expire. Still, we are terrified at letting the government reduce healthcare costs and institute a workable system because someone told us – rather conclusively incorrectly – that we have the best healthcare system in the world. We drop the standards in our schools, expect our next generation to compete against better-educated workers “over there,” and want to erect trade barriers to protect our domestic labor force.

The list of “fear factors” that allow politicians to run amok with stupid slogans that do little other than get them elected… and probably create vastly more harm than good… is immense, and I am sure you have your share to add to this list. But the basic premise here is that Americans are acting out of fear, have lost confidence in themselves, and as a result have elected a do-nothing, polarize Congress that simply cannot function anymore. The fear policies that have slipped by have literally devastated our spirit, catered to our worse self-image, have made most of the world resent us, have contributed massively to our loss of confidence and are the product of a nation that seems to be terrified of just about everything in sight. It’s time to start thinking positively and question and decisions that have their roots in fear.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I certainly hope that Americans regain their strength very soon before they alienate the entire planet out of a notion of widening xenophobia.