Author Topic: Morford: What Are You So Afraid Of ???  (Read 3836 times)

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Offline Deborah

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Morford: What Are You So Afraid Of ???
« on: March 17, 2004, 10:50:00 PM »
Gotta love Mark. He tells it like it is. One of the few who are so gifted that they can make tragedy enjoyable to read. Enjoy.

What Are You So Afraid Of?
Sex? Gays? Terrorists? God? In BushCo's fear-drunk world, only one question really matters

(By Mark Morford)
Oh my God but we are one terrified nation.

Fear is in. Fear is the new black. Spritz it on your face and neck, walk around the world
all quivering and tremulous, waiting to be crushed by some dark massive throbbing wall of
evil at any moment.

Fear is everywhere. Classrooms, water coolers, truck commercials. Fear is our government's
raison d'etre, the calling card of the GOP. It will be the prime motivator in this year's
presidential election, as Karl Rove will command that Dubya beat the drum of fear loud and
hard and nonstop, smirking all the way.

Fear of terrorists fear of gay marriage fear of women and foreigners and the poor and
environmentalists and progressives and Janet Jackson and hippies and commies and gul-dang
liberals who want to take away your guns and make you think for yourself. We cannot have
that.

Vote for us, the GOP will scream, and we will make sure to slaughter all those evil hippie
demons, all while keeping your fear at a fever pitch via a never-ending parade of freshly
minted evils that threaten your numbed McDonald's-gorged diabetic asthmatic children who can't breathe due to all the air-quality laws we've gouged. Shhh.

Fear has served the GOP beautifully. It won them the election and let them launch two
full-blown wars and has pumped billions into the coffers of crony corporations and there is no reason to stop now.

Fear is bombing Afghanistan, right now. Fear is why we are decimating Iraq. A massive murderous budget-busting U.N.-hating war on a nonthreatening nation would have been unspeakable and intolerable had the GOP not deliberately engaged in truly world-class fearmongering beforehand, all about leveraging the sadness of 9/11 and tying it to nonexistent WMDs and biotoxins and nukes and scary bearded foreigners who are all hell bent on slaughtering American babies with rusty machetes.

Basic truism of politics, worldwide: Get the populace scared enough, and you can get away with anything. Fear yanks away your basic civil liberties, your intuition, your sense of dignity and humane behavior.

Fear means not blinking an eye as you remove your belt and your shoes as you allow your carry-on to be dumped out and rifled through and your toddler to be groped and her teddy bear strip searched by some snickering security personnel.

Fear means barely wincing as the utterly draconian USA Patriot Act gets reamed through
Congress, twice, giving the FBI and police appalling new powers to monitor your e-mail and
your Web-site visits and credit card usage and telephone calls sans warning or warrant or even probable cause. Fear means no longer saying hey, just what the hell is wrong with you people?

Fear is a tactic. It is a calculated force, a strategic maneuver, a carefully constructed
PR methodology. It is a poison in the air, a cancer in the national bloodstream, a media
pastime and a cultural narcotic. And here's the biggest secret of all: Fear is a learned trait, a practiced habit. It is something you cling to and allow to fester. They are counting on it.

Fear is why we buy SUVs. Fear of horrible spine-mangling accidents, fear of smashing head-on into a Mack truck at 90 mph at any given moment, fear that just around the next corner is an enormous gorge full of anthrax and gangbangers and demonic vegans that we will have to traverse just so little Timmy can make it to therapy and Daddy can haul his load of dry cleaning back from the office.

Never mind that SUVs have hideous road manners and are, in fact, far more deadly than smaller cars and suffer far more accidents than smaller cars, which are much better at avoiding accidents in the first place. Fear scoffs at this. Fear knows it's all about convincing you that horrible accidents and ungodly pain are inevitable, even if they're not. After all, fear drives a Hummer.

And logic? Poor ol' logic breaks down in the face of fear. Fear has no patience for common sense and spits at it and smashes it with a baseball bat and treats it like Dick Cheney treats a fat, docile pheasant.

Fear is why we love our guns. Fear is why we love our huge knobby tires and Super-sized fries and ultraviolent sports, making us feel all manly and corpulent and invincible. Fear is why we pummel the weak, hate the different, cling to uptight religious doctrine that we know, deep down, is sapping our soul and crushing our independent thought and numbing our sexual potency.

Try this test. Ask your neighborhood neoconservative homophobe just what, exactly, would happen if, say, gay marriage were to be legalized nationwide.

Ask them what would change. Ask them to be very specific. How would their lives be threatened? How would society crumble, exactly? Riots? Locusts? What is the danger in allowing love to flourish in all its variants and be enthusiastically supported by the state? Be as clear as possible. What, really, is so  terrifying?

Fear, it just is. It nibbles away at our souls like a tapeworm. It is our own personal
kryptonite.

It does not matter. For most of us, letting go and dissolving tight, harmful definitions of self and forsaking, say, an angry sneering homophobic God in favor of cultivating a messy raw juicy delicious wet incredibly difficult sense of personal responsibility and open-mouthed divinity is far too much to ask. We are terrified to even try. The church is counting on it.

We do know one thing: Change freaks us out. It is an upheaval of what was, the known, the stable, the safe. Change -- social, sexual, political -- is confusing and troubling and forces us to question our own inhibitions and moral shortcomings and deep inborn prejudices and who the hell wants to do that? No one, that's who.

Fear means never having to dig very deep, never having to ask serious questions of the self. There, there now. Don't bother thinking for yourself. Let the priests and the government CEOs and the war hawks make it all better. Boom boom crush snicker.

There are, of course, plenty of ways to defeat fear. You hear little about them because they aren't nearly as sexy or dire for media and politicians. After all, fear sells copy, moves product, draws ratings, gets votes. Defeating fear is for New Agers and peaceniks and pot smokers. Right? Whatever.

This is all you have to do to defeat fear: You don't. That is to say, you actually do the
opposite, which is to promote the positive, educate yourself, drop your tired notions of
how it's all supposed to work and pump out what the ancients knew to be a radiant kind of raw ego-free love. What, too fluffy? Tough.

Because only by making your world, your body, your perspective truly "in love" does anything actually change. It ain't pink hearts and fluffy bunnies and Hallmark swill. It's the most difficult and often most painful and life-altering thing you can do. It means forgoing the safe, questioning your deepest belief, peeling back the self in ways you can't even imagine until you get there and you say, oh my freaking God this is a pain in the karmic ass.

But once you tap into something divine and deeply personal and free of the spewings of the hate-filled homophobic Right and the whiny politically correct Left, only then can you use this energy to battle the demons of ignorance and  fearmongering on every front, every day. Because, simply put, the more you know yourself, the less you fear. It is the only way. And you can start immediately.

After all, what are you so afraid of?


$!$!$!$!$!$!$!$!$!$!$!$!$
http://www.costofwar.com/
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Offline thepatriot

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Morford: What Are You So Afraid Of ???
« Reply #1 on: March 18, 2004, 09:06:00 AM »
Don't know if I agree with all but I do with most. By the way how did this whole SUV thing get started anyway??????? Other than being gas guzzlers, why would that even be a issue and yes I own one. But even most of the tree hugging libs on Capitol hill that speak out against them own one too !!!!! what gives? I doubt owning a SUV will bring own the country
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Offline Antigen

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Morford: What Are You So Afraid Of ???
« Reply #2 on: March 18, 2004, 03:34:00 PM »
SUVs are just a symbol. The reality is that we burn more oil producing electricity and heating buildings than running cars of any kind.

And we could use cleaner burning biofuel much more inexpensively than fossile fuels if we were to figure in the costs of all these wars and other matters of state necessary to secure our "cheap" oil supplies. Then we could all putter around in SUVs w/o contributing to either the environmental issues or the political issues surrounding fossile fuels.

But we're living in an age of short attention span. If it's more complicated than an episode of Friends, you've lost your audience. And it's just easier and simpler to hate some villan than to actually knuckle down and solve a problem. I'd take the anti-SUV ppl a bit more seriously if they'd invest in biofuel crops and processing plants here in SW PA. Hempfield would be an excellent location, for example. Mean time, I'm not looking to them for any help. All they want to talk about is more government coercion to "fix" things.

Here's freedom to him who would read;
 
Here's freedom to him who would write;

None ever feared that the truth should be heard,

But them that the truth would indict.


--author unknown (circa 1914)

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Offline ehm

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Morford: What Are You So Afraid Of ???
« Reply #3 on: March 18, 2004, 03:56:00 PM »
I hate SUVs. They take up too much space, and if one hits you, you're screwed! Especially if you're in a smaller car. I also think they're a big waste of gas/money. That's just my opinion, not to mention I was in two accidents with two different SUVs, (both their faults) in the past four months. Both cars were totaled, thank God for insurance. I supposed my opinion is pretty biased.  :wink:
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Offline thepatriot

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Morford: What Are You So Afraid Of ???
« Reply #4 on: March 18, 2004, 04:25:00 PM »
I see both your points but bottom line the individual consumer pays the bill!!!!!! at the prices charged. My SUV harms nobody, I just think their are bigger issues than what someone CHOOSES to drive thats all. And for most of the politicians and political pundits making a stink, they need to put their money where there mouth is. Its like Gun ownership...Rosie Odonnell big anti gun advocate, but owns a gun. She feels she is entitled because of her celebrity status. But feels the average citizens is far too irresponsible to own one, making you and me not entitled. I guess its just the whole patronizing condisendig BS....that pisses me off.

[ This Message was edited by: thepatriot on 2004-03-18 13:26 ]
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arasota Straight Escapee

Offline Anonymous

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Morford: What Are You So Afraid Of ???
« Reply #5 on: March 18, 2004, 05:11:00 PM »
The problem I have with SUVs is the same problem I have with all the other inflated products our government is shoving down our throats.  People who are already in debt up to their eyeballs are being given financing deals of a life time to buy more debt.  Don't you wonder why debt is being shoved down your throat?  The banks are begging you to refinance your home at 100+ equity, and anyone and their brother can get a loan on a $20,000 SUV.  Don't you wonder where this is leading and why?

In simple terms, our government is creating money out of debt.  It's the biggest scheme ever designed.  If anyone is interested to know how they do it, I can recommend a great book.  The problem is it isn't sustainable.  It eventually falls over because there is no foundation.  We lost that when we went off the Gold Standard.  Are you aware that the Constitution states that "no state shall coin money"?  Our founding fathers were very, very smart except in this regard.  They should have said "no state or institution shall coin money".  That was the loop hole.  Our criminals in Washington developed the institute of Central Banks.  They are at the top of the money game.  They are lining their coffers with all you hard earned dollars.  When the house of cards come tumbling down, you and I will be the poor slaves, and they will be the same rich assholes they are now.

The Contrarian
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Offline thepatriot

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Morford: What Are You So Afraid Of ???
« Reply #6 on: March 18, 2004, 05:22:00 PM »
Ok Contrairian......I manage my debt ie; I have very little. So the government shoves SUV's down our throats....really? I'll remember that the next time I see a commercial for a navigator or Hummer. That it is really a secret government ploy. God get over yourself are you really that paranoid? has somebody forced you against your will to go into hock up to your eyeballs and make you buy a SUV?????? Don't tell me you are the real Unibomber right??? god give me a break. You might be afraid of being somebodys slave I on the other hand know better, you are buying into fear and paranoia. But hey...thats your choice, get off the couch and vote or run for office if you want change
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Offline Anonymous

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Morford: What Are You So Afraid Of ???
« Reply #7 on: March 18, 2004, 05:36:00 PM »
Patriot - I have no debt, and never will again.  I am also buying Gold and Silver which is real money.  Do I want change?  No, I wish I could continue the very comfortable life I have right now, but I know change will come whether I want it or not.  Can I influence, in anyway, how we change?  No more that I could stop an asteriod from plowing into earth.

Am I just being paranoid?  Maybe.  Fearful? Probably.  But I am not so far off base when you take the time to study world economics the way I have.  

The Contrarian
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Offline thepatriot

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Morford: What Are You So Afraid Of ???
« Reply #8 on: March 18, 2004, 05:38:00 PM »
Well for someone who says they are comfortable you sound pretty dam miserable about what "Could" happen. But hey enjoy :wave:
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arasota Straight Escapee

Offline Anonymous

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Morford: What Are You So Afraid Of ???
« Reply #9 on: March 18, 2004, 05:48:00 PM »
It sounds like your life is one hell of a dream.
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Offline thepatriot

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Morford: What Are You So Afraid Of ???
« Reply #10 on: March 18, 2004, 06:01:00 PM »
Yeah and Im livin it buddy, you should get some anti depressant meds....your one miserable SOB! :wave:
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Offline Froderik

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Morford: What Are You So Afraid Of ???
« Reply #11 on: March 18, 2004, 09:49:00 PM »
Hey, I heard gas is going up to $2 a gallon soon. Fuck that.  :grin:
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Offline Antigen

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Morford: What Are You So Afraid Of ???
« Reply #12 on: March 19, 2004, 01:39:00 PM »
Quote
On 2004-03-18 14:22:00, thepatriot wrote:

That it is really a secret government ploy. God get over yourself are you really that paranoid?


Ok, the US Federal government is the largest employer in the country. Between local, state and federal taxes, most people fork over around half of their earnings. W/ the new Medicaid drug benefits, that figure is expected to double (DOUBLE... so we'll be working 75% of the time for the Cat in the Hat and keeping roughly 25% of our "earnings") We have troops stationed in 70% of the world's countries.

Now, do you suppose there's no method to this madness? No one's got any particular ideas about what to do with all this military and ecconomic power? You think it's paranoid to speculate on who has what kind of plans for all our wealth? I think it's plain stupid not to.

Just two questions, Patriot. Who's fuckin' who and where'd the money go?

(come on, Mac! Give me a good one!)

Wicked men obey from fear, good men from love.
--Aristotle

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"Don\'t let the past remind us of what we are not now."
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