Yes...but! October 29 2001

October 29 2001

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Fear. I looked up the word in the dictionary, which defines it in two ways: (1) an unpleasant emotion caused by exposure to danger or expectation of pain, and (2) show reverence towards. There seems to be a lot of the first and not enough of the other, a lot of anxiety and little genuine piety.

Clinical depression was already rampant before the economy tanked and before the Terrorist Attack. Now with threatened job losses and infections willfully perpetrated by evil religious fanatics, panic and dread will intensify. We all know that our medical system is already under stress. With the further fright factor, sicknesses increase even more, which adds to waiting time and this again feeds on fear.

Fear is often irrational. In 1962 at a North Carolina textile factory a worker reported being bitten by a poisonous insect and became sick. Within one week 62 other workers claimed the same. But the bug did not even exist. Nevertheless the world is a more dangerous place. After four decades of assuming that infectious diseases had vanished, we find ourselves besieged by microbes. Tuberculosis, nearly eradicated in the '70's, now claims millions of lives annually. Malaria, once on the brink of extinction, now has more than 100 millions victims each year. AIDS slays tens of millions. It was unknown prior to 1961. The water we drink is often improperly purified, the air we breathe potentially lethal; the food we eat possibly poisonous. And then there are new diseases, such as Lasa, Ebola, and old viruses in new locations, hantavirus, yellow fever, dengue. So, no wonder that people are fearful. And all the time the pressures on doctors and hospitals is growing while the population ages, which places more strain on the healing agencies.

Until 9/11 people had still some confidence in the magic of technology and the miracles of our wonderful economy, but when those planes were steered into these tall buildings and thousands of deaths were caused by the melting steel and crumbling concrete, the collapse of the World Trade Center caused a lot of people to question whether the optimism generated by the New World Order and the New Economy that would 'grow' forever and bring prosperity to all, was built on false hope.

So, in addition to fear, uncertainty has gripped the nation and I hope that out of our mood of misgivings comes forth some real questioning. I hope that we will confront politicians who tell us that if we only spend, if we only fly to exotic far away places, if we only go out and eat gourmet dinners and buy expensive presents and indulge ourselves, then our fears will disappear and the glorious pre 9/11 days will return. Perhaps we should ask them and ourselves if we have given the 'free market' the status of god. Perhaps we should admit that we were sacrificing to this idol our farmers, our farmlands, our communities, our forests, our wetlands, our prairies, our ecosystems and watersheds. Perhaps we should acknowledge that we have accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business. Perhaps we should come clean that we have paid too little attention to the frightening lot of most of the world's people, now so vividly displayed to us in Afghanistan with its milling millions of dispossed wanderers.

Perhaps we deserve some of that uncertainty that has been the lot of most of these people. Our economy has always depended in innovation, from one new invention to another. We never even dreamed that a new kind of war would turn our inventions of flying machines into explosive projectiles, steered by people whose sole aim was annihilation. We did not anticipate that we might be trapped into the network of communications that would pursue us relentlessly everywhere we went, depriving us of spare time, privacy and family life. We never thought through the possibility that our weaponry and war knowledge that we marketed and taught to the world would become available to religious fanatics, whom we then call terrorists, even though they simply practised what we preached and provided.

Of course , there are ways to combat fear. The Globe and Mail has an easy formula to deal with fear: exercise, share your feelings; take time for yourself; eat healthy; don't skip vacations; get enough sleep; help others; laughter is the best medicine; don't be afraid to ask for help. These are good tips, but we are more than little islands: we all are caught up in the tangles of each others' lives and, thanks to our news networks, which must fill their 24 hours with idle chatter, we all are fed a constant menu of doom and gloom, and so everybody gets a severe case of jitteritis.

We have had a wake-up call. With the risk of sounding trite, I dare say that we must have more fear, in the sense of more reverence. Reverence toward each other. Reverence for ourselves, our families, our community, our world and all that it contains.