Fear This

I'm going to run the risk this morning of being the cranky old guy that everyone avoids. Quiet Ron.

Anyway, my blog, my rules. I'll write what I want, and you can avoid it if you want.

I'm sick of the fearmongering in this world. I shouldn't be; it's nothing new under the sun. It's always been here and likely always will. Still, there are times it frazzles a guy.

When I was 14 and a freshman in high school (to save you the time figuring out when, it was 1974) I remember our science teacher giving us a handout which said we would be out of oil by 1985. Period, end of report, no doubt about it. Yet here we are today with a couple hundred years of known reserves. Right about the same time we were pummeled with tales of a nuclear winter which would freeze us all out. Now we're apparently too hot. I think I'm within my rights to ask, what the hell? Why do you want to scare kids like that? And why are we still doing it today?

Ronald Reagan was leading us into nuclear holocaust. When AIDS first came out I read an article which claimed that the United States Army alone would have a million cases by 1995 or so. Neither concern hit anywhere near the heights that were predicted. Reagan, I will be partisan and say, put the entire world on much better footing in unison with Margaret Thatcher and St. John Paul the Great. And need I even mention COVID as an example of what hysterical fear causes?

Just to show that this rant isn't driven only by my personal philosophy, the right does it too. Barack Obama was not a particularly good President so far as I'm concerned, but he wasn't His Satanic Majesty either. Trying to remove President Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal was a sideshow that wasted our time and energy. Few people out to gut the Second Amendment are fire breathing commies. Many of them are otherwise good people who simply disagree with you. We don't need to insult anyone, especially those we may actually convert to our line of reasoning if we're patient and civil.

It all becomes one big game of the boy who cried wolf. One of these days a true crisis may arise which actually threatens life, the universe, and everything and a lot of folks (like me) are going to say humbug simply because we've heard it all before. We need to be better about seeing things as they are and acting from that rather than trying to play people, especially the young, like puppets. We need to begin speaking to others, or at least not merely speaking at them as though they're great stupid fools too ignorant to believe the 'obvious'. It's beneath our dignity as human beings, and I'm sick of the whole thing.