On Fear

I once read that the opposite of love is not hate, but rather fear. Interesting, right? Fear, is the absence of love, it is what drives anger, violence, and other negative emotions/actions. Hate is a complement of love, therefore, it is comprised of love at its core. This may sound a bit metaphysical to some, but the point that I am trying to get at is that fear is the opposite of love.

That being said, when we act out of fear, we unleash all kinds of wrath onto ourselves and others, which prevents us from doing good for ourselves and others. Let me give you an example. When you are stuck in a job that you absolutely dislike, but are too afraid to take the next step and apply somewhere else for fear of letting go of your supposed comfort.

Refusing to change for the better even though there are greater benefits than consequences to the change for fear of [insert excuse here]. There are so many instances where fear holds us back from our true potential, and let me tell you, I have been guilty of all of them I’m sure.

But the beauty of life and living, I believe, comes when we release that fear. Yes, it is easier said than done, but if you go through the correct process for yourself, the benefits are amazing. Suddenly, that new positive relationship you have been looking for everywhere appears to you. Your dream job becomes suddenly available and you have the opportunity to apply.

It is important to note as well that opportunities present themselves to us on the daily, whether we choose to act on them is on us. Again, what keeps us from acting on those great opportunities is fear.

Fear is comparable, in my opinion, to sucking our thumb as an infant. It becomes ingrained in us as a sort of comfort that we can revert to whenever something is different or challenging. We know that in the long run it is bad for us, but we do it anyway. Why? Because it is what we learned as children.

Fear kept us from running into the street because a car might run us over. Fear kept us from touching the stove because we might get burned. Fear kept us from staying out too late as teenagers because we might get in trouble. Fear, fear, fear.

Now, in all of these examples I just gave fear has kept us safe, but it is a false sense of security with a double agenda. Yes, fear keeps us from doing dangerous things, but at the same time, it also keeps
us from doing amazing things.

What we should focus on, then, is respect. I respect traffic laws, therefore, I will not run into the street. I respect that heat can hurt me, so I will not touch a hot stove. I respect my parents and their rules, so I will not come home late.

See what I just did? I turned the fear around and converted it to respect.

If you respect someone, you don’t try to infringe on their rights. However, if you fear them, you try to take away their rights and privileges for fear of what they may do if they have them.

I can go on and on about fear and how it is the sole cause of so many terrible things that happen in our lives and in our country, but the truth of the matter is, I don’t want to. Why? Because I don’t want to sound preachy and you do not want to hear it either. It’s not hard to see for yourself how fear is at the core of violence, oppression, racism, discrimination, etc. I invite you to look beyond what the telecasters tell you and really examine the news for its core values. You will find fear in the most unlikely of places, even in a television commercial advertising a clothing sale.

Should We Lock Up the Sane?

A new studythe MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study — found that those living with classic mental illness — schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression — alone are not likely to use guns when they commit acts of violence:

“For the small group of people with mental illness who are at risk of committing gun violence, improved collaborations with the criminal justice system are clearly indicated,” the researchers stated. “However, directly targeting mental illness as the major driver of gun violence is misguided. … Prior violence, substance use, and early trauma are more likely to contribute to subsequent violence than is mental illness per se. In this regard, the politically inspired haste to focus gun control efforts on people being treated for a mental illness, rather than on people with demonstrated indicators of violence risk, such as restraining orders related to domestic violence, seems particularly misdirected.”

This contradicts the latest psychophobic reign of error that comes upon the shooting in Charleston, South Carolina. It isn’t the mentally ill who shoot people, but those who have no psychiatric diagnosis. So what are we going to do about them?

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Charleston AME Shooting

As I write this, I can only begin to imagine the number of people who have jumped to the conclusion that the shooter at the Charleston AME Church was mentally ill. By this time tomorrow, even if the shooter has not been caught, we will hear the pundits debating what kind of disability afflicted the shooter. Undoubtedly there will be more calls for Forced Outpatient Treatment.

There are a few things to keep in mind before we turn Charleston into our reason-to-support-Murphy’s-Law-of-the-day:

  • We have no idea who the shooter is at this point, except that he is white and in his twenties or thirties.
  • South Carolina has “Assisted” Outpatient Treatment. So even if he was mentally ill, the much ballyhooed program sure as hell didn’t prevent anything here.
  • The man had a gun that let him kill a lot of people including a state senator.
  • White supremacist activity has been on the rise.

Rest assured that the NRA — which backs the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act — will blame this on mental illness at the earliest possible press conference. We’re the scapegoat for this kind of thing every time it happens.

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We Should Stop Using Mass Murderers as Our Poster Children for Change

It’s going to happen again with the same reaction by the media. Maybe we will wake up tomorrow morning and see the report in our morning newspaper; maybe we will hear about it from a coworker at lunchtime; or it will be the lead story of the evening news. Mass murder. Mentally Ill Man. The words will be slung together and dished out to a public which has been bred to believe that mental illness and violence are strongly correlated. Politicians, doctors, family members, and activists will devise plans to cope with the problem. It happened with the Virginia Tech shootings, it happened with the recent Germanwings crash. Autism, bipolar disorder, depression, and schizophrenia have all been implicated at one time or another. The mentally ill cannot be trusted, goes the drumbeat. Schizophrenics and bipolars are killers.

Statistics show that about 3% of the mentally ill are violent. We are ten times more likely to be the victims of violent crime than perpetrators. Yet when we are portrayed on television or the movies, sixty percent of the depictions commit crimes, especially violence. So coupled with the way news outlets spin stories about mass murder, the general public believes that we are ax murderers and serial killers.

Some reformers use this fear to drive some very specific agendas, namely destruction of our rights to privacy, forced medication, and the resurrection of mental hospitals. The objective is to control the mentally ill. They might argue that this is the best we can get in a society with our values, but that is a weak defense of some very problematic and questionable policy changes.

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