Fear as a governing tool

Have you ever had one of those rare moments of insight where something at once seems so obvious that you break out laughing? I had one last week. We were standing at the Ted Stevens airport in Anchorage, one of those zigzag lines, and a guy going the other way in line said “Are you going to Dallas?” I said no, and he quickly shot back “Chicago?”. I did not tell him our destination, but thought that if he had asked a typical American, he’d be turned into authorities for suspicious activity.

He probably just wanted me to deliver some cocaine for him. No big deal.

And then it hit me: All of our airport security, even if it is effective, is pointless. All a ‘terrist’ A-Rab or Muslim has to do is put a bomb in a suitcase, take it to security, and blow it up right there, where all the people are. Nothing has been screened at that point, so that it could be a pipe, nuclear, fertilizer or McDonald’s grease bomb.

And it hasn’t happened. For whatever reason, very few people on the planet want to kill civilians for its own sake. We’re safe. But our governing system since the early 1950’s has been predicated on the fact that we are a National Security State, and that we must always be afraid of something. So we are inculcated from youth in the culture of fear – crime, drugs, Communism, and now terrorism. The result is a people so easily manipulated by some archetype villain like Osama or Saddam that we readily support our government, run by sociopaths, as they plunder, attack and terrorize the globe.

It is tempting at times to simply go some place where people are both relaxed and behaved, like Canada or Costa Rica. We have talked about it at times, but family, of course, keeps us here. Neither of those countries is likely to be attacked by the U.S. any time soon, and so their people are at peace.

Life is always a struggle to survive, and bad things happen. There are bad dudes everywhere. Our country is run by cliques of corporate and military sociopaths who dangle images of pretty people in front of us to act as “leaders.”.

Sociopaths are everywhere, maybe four percent of our population, and one percent in other countries, according to Harvard’s Dr. Margaret Stout. So there is nowhere to hide from them. George W. Bush is one, as surely were Cheney and Rumsfeld, Kissinger, Nixon, and Bill Clinton, to name but a few.

But people in other lands have a more casual attitude about danger, perhaps due to the incredibly low odds of bad things happening, but most likely because they have not been subject to the intense and corrupting propaganda that enmeshes us.

The French have been overrun in the past by real monsters, and their country devastated by two wars in the twentieth century alone. Yet the country does not run on fear, as ours does. We make fun of them, I know, but it is we, and not them, who are the real pussies of the planet.

So please, dear Americans, take a deep breath, let it out, and then next time as you make your way through airport security, remember that you are in more danger at that point in time than at any time during your flight. And that danger is virtually nil.

Think of airport security for what it really is: A jobs program, and as George Carlin reminded us, a way to make white people feel safe when they fly. If only … if only … Americans could know that they are safe, then the rest of the planet could relax too. We could stop the bombing, invading, occupying. .

Americans … you are safe. Now sleep … sleep, my sweet white knights of the planet. Tomorrow is a brand new day. Keep up what you are doing, and there will be no one left alive to rescue.