April 19, 2023
A young man is sent by his
mother to pick up his two younger siblings, who are at a friend’s house. He
thinks he knows where he’s going, but it turns out he’s mistaken. He walks up
to the door of a house he’s never been to before, unknowing at that moment he
was at the wrong house. He rings the doorbell, and he waits—but not for long.
And then with no warning, no
words, a man inside the house shoots his gun through the glass window of the
front door—twice. The first time, he shoots the teen standing on the front porch
in the head, and that young man falls to the ground. And then the man with the
gun aims and fires again, this time shooting his body. Fortunately, this young
man survives, somehow. Oh, and he tried to get help from the neighbors, but the
first two refused to help the bleeding teen. The third only helped the bleeding
boy after he got on the ground and raised his hands—and then lost consciousness.
Meanwhile, a couple of days
later and a few states away a young woman is riding in a car with some friends
on her way with other friends to find a house wherein lives—you guessed it, yet
another friend. They’re young, it’s Saturday night, and they only want to have
a good evening with their friends.
But they’re in a rural area
and they get lost. There’s no cell signal, and not much light. The driver turns
down a driveway, and soon realizes that no, this isn’t the right place. That
driver is in the process of turning around when a man comes out onto his porch
and fires his gun—and the young woman passenger in the car is killed.
You may recognize these stories
from the news over the last few days. And you may think that I’m going to rail
against gun violence. But while the sheer number of guns available so freely in
the United States is a problem, and gun violence surely is a serious problem, I
don’t think that it’s the biggest problem my neighbors to the south are facing.
I think the biggest problem is
fear.
Thanks to so many people
stirring up so many fears for so very long, I believe that people are reaching
an inevitable tipping point. Fear has become an epidemic in the United States,
and I don’t see any signs of it tapering off anytime soon. It’s fear that
drives irrational behavior and holy moly, is there ever a lot of irrational
behavior being displayed these days.
Our news headlines are teeming
with tales of doom and gloom and violence. All those negative things sell. One
of the less redeeming qualities we have as human beings is that we tend to
remember the horrible, scary things that happen as opposed to the good things.
We tend to want to turn our heads and look at the car wreck. We even will
sometimes giggle when we hear of someone going through tremendous difficulties.
So first, we have our own human
nature appearing to be out to get us. I think we each have a responsibility to
engage in some self-assessment. Sort of a kind of inner spring cleaning.
But on top of our own innate
nature, others have stoked fears using what they know to be lies, and those are
the cancerous cells walking and talking and breathing among us. It is the
abundance of lies, and our growing tolerance for the presence of same that have
worked to stoke the fears that never stay just as fears for long. It’s a
universal truth that fear grows into a constant state of nervousness. Then that
nervousness rolls into terror. And finally, terror crosses the border into
paranoia.
And paranoia always has its
finger on the trigger.
Yes, we have racism rampant
around us, and racism comes, I believe, from a lethal mix of fear and hate.
This mixture is toxic and is very much another source of the violence and near
mob-mentality we are seeing displayed around us and in the news.
The wrong door shooting victim
is black, and the man who shot him, white. But in the second instance, the case
of the wrong driveway? Both shooter and victim were white. Which just proves my
point.
Fear, like many human
emotions, knows no color boundaries. It’s universal—and it needs to be eased.
Love,
Morgan
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury
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