Day 393- Fear, Divisiveness, Lies and More Fear
The last four days I have watched as much of the RNC as I could stomach. I had to turn some of it off. Now before I get started on the RNC in particular, I will stipulate this in general. Politicians lie. They exaggerate. They incite fear. They tell you how bad things are and then they tell you how they’re going to solve them. This is a classic sales tactic taught to me when I worked for IBM. It’s been used by politicians and priests for thousands of years.
The RNC convention was classic in that sense. It was a display of fear mongering (crime is bad and getting worse, the economy is collapsing, the world is on fire, the liberals want to take God away from you), divisiveness (a pastor in the benediction literally said Hillary Clinton and the liberals are the “enemy”) and lies (there were too many in Trump’s hour plus acceptance speech to even keep count of). There were calls for Hillary Clinton to be jailed and one of Trump’s staffers even said she should be executed. The truth seems to be the first casualty when people are trying to stoke fear.
It all comes down to that base emotion of fear. It’s how the media manipulates us. It’s what the news outlets use to keep us glued to our TVs (everything is BREAKING NEWS) and everything’s going to kill us. ISIS is a threat to our very existence even though your chances of being killed by lightning are several times greater than being killed by a terrorist. ZIka is coming for us. Ebola is coming for us- oh wait, that was last year.
The DNC convention is next week. There will be a steady dose of fear there too. I hope maybe less lies, but I’m not holding my breath. They will tell us Donald Trump is an existential threat to our country.
The opposite emotion of fear is love. Some say there are only two base emotions and all others stem from those. Those two emotions are love and fear. One of my mentors has encourage us on the side of love to choose love to fight the fear and that is what I am going to endeavor to do. The hashtag he has used is #makeAmericakindagain. I like that. It’s easy to get into fighting fire with fire- fight lies with more lies. Fight hate with hate, Fight fear with more fear. That’s the natural, instinctive reaction. I, for one, am going to try to resist it. We’ll see how I do.
I have to say I’m glad the Fear Fest is over. I could not take even one more day. That was a very ugly display of humans when they’re whipped into a frenzy and pointed at an enemy. And the enemy isn’t ISIS- it’s Hillary Clinton and the liberals- their own countrymen who were blamed for every ill in the world over the last couple of decades. ::: shudder:::::
