Welcome to your 2021 (E)piphany
Maybe it's long overdue
In his first inaugural address, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt kept things short (20 minutes) and sweet (scant mention of policy), but he managed to deliver this memorable line:
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Historians say FDR may have borrowed the phrase from Thoreau — or, perhaps, a Wanamaker’s ad. Whatever his source, why would he say it?
FDR knew that people are hard-wired to fear, and there was plenty to fear in the Dirty Thirties. From a survival standpoint, putting fear first makes sense (Run! A saber-toothed tiger!), but in real life, fear gets in the way. Our brain’s amygdala registers that something is amiss, then hands things off to the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, which decide whether the thing that is amiss is a threat.
Here’s where things get messy. That decision is made using a mental shortcut called the availability heuristic, where we rapid-rifle through the note cards in our heads to find patterns and ascertain threat.
The process is horribly flawed. Here’s part of the issue, boiled down to a helpful chart:
On this day in Christendom, some Christians celebrate Epiphany — or Three Kings Day — when the Magi were said to have made their way to pay homage to Baby Jesus.
Now, epiphany, or epiphaneia (appearance), is a word we mostly apply to important realizations.
On this day in Washington, Congress will meet in a joint session to count the nation’s electoral votes (they will not certify the votes, a misnomer we should probably drop). What is usually a perfunctory event will most likely be theatrically gummed up by people who have pulled out all the stops to keep the current occupant in the Oval Office. Consider this the last gasp of a band whose members have masterfully used fear to rule. The method didn’t start with them, but over a relatively short period of time, this band has actively and vocally encouraged the (white people of this) country to publicly fear any one/thing outside the orbit of the Oval Office occupant — Black people, Mexicans, Democrats, strong women — though, oddly, not the coronavirus.
For some of us, this has felt like home — twisted, but home, because fear can be a component of religion, too. As a Bible-thumping fundamentalist, I worried continually about Judgment Day, at which I and everyone I loved most assuredly would be found wanting. And then, we would file into the lake of fire, where our flesh would melt from our bones over and over again throughout all eternity. No, that didn’t make sense scientifically, but remember: Fear trumps (sorry) reason, and logic falls to the side when Jesus is coming, and boy, is He pissed.
My godly fear fueled everything, including weekly stints spent knocking doors for Jesus. By age 12, I was a regular on your porch, carrying a fistful of pamphlets meant to frighten you into submission. My motivation for interrupting your Saturdays with threats of hellfire was to save my soul — and yes, yours.
I’m sorry about that. I meant well. Blame cognitive bias.
Breaking away from that theology took everything I had. My religion’s exclusivity and misogyny made no sense to me, but fear kept me in the pew. What was life like outside the church? I couldn’t imagine. My fear of hell outweighed my love of God, but over time I realized that the portal through which I was meant to crawl to get to heaven was too small. I left my fear, kept my faith, and backed away.
And now, I sleep through thunderstorms. I know when a saber-toothed tiger is real, and when it’s pretend. So much of what made me angry these last four years was made-up, fear-as-a-tool nonsense. We have so much work to do and we need to face the actual tigers calmly and clear-eyed, and not be distracted by nonsense.
So in the end, it doesn’t matter who said it, a president, a poet, or an ad. We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Happy Epiphany to you and yours.