(Inspiration and some of the ideas for this sermon came from a lecture by Angela Davis, broadcast on Alternative Radio on 7/17/07 and from a speech by Forrest Church at the General Assembly of 2008.)
As many of you know, the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association was held this year in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The Convention Center there lies within the port of Fort Lauderdale, so we met within a perimeter under the jurisdiction of Homeland Security. What this meant, we were told, was that we would have to show a government issued photo ID, such as a driver's license or a passport in order to enter the GA events. This in the name of national security. Many people protested, thinking it unseemly and/or an infringement upon civil liberties to have to show such an ID at our religious conference. Others cited the 11%, or so of Americans, such as those who do not drive or those here without documentation, who do not have such ID. Others expressed concern for trans-gendered persons who might no longer look like the pictures on their ID. Many protested and did not attend General Assembly. In fact, there were about 1500 less people than last year, although no one knows if that was primarily due to protests or if the economy kicked in, or even if the beastly hot weather of south Florida was a turn-off. Others, myself included, came to Fort Lauderdale to carry on the conversation about civil liberties and about a fear society, which they did. I do not think another GA planning committee will book us into a Homeland Security perimeter ever again.
So what happened? What was it like? Entry to the Convention Center was through a fenced in check-point and indeed, a guard was always there, with a smile, checking ID's. The first day, before GA actually started, Matthew had to go to the Convention Center for his volunteer job and as he went through the check-point, the guard asked him if he had any weapons! She believed him when he answered "Not that I know of." That same day I met him there and, because of the way I entered, (through the port side instead of the Convention Center side), I was checked three different times before I actually got inside. Although no incidents occurred at the check-points and no one that I am aware of was turned away, and the guards were politely friendly, two UU ministers were also stationed at the fence as chaplains.
But. Most of the GA hotels were located a bit of a distance from the Convention Center and it was too hot to walk the mile or two between them. The planning committee hired buses to shuttle us from our hotels to the Convention Center and back, which they did with regularity.= The upshot: a majority of people entered the Homeland Security perimeter by bus and NEVER had their ID's checked at all. Not when we boarded the bus and not when we got off it. Nor did most of us wear our GA badges on the bus. Anyone could have gotten on the buses and entered the port.
This disturbs me most of all. The ports in the United States do pose a genuine risk and the need to increase their security is pretty well agreed upon by all. This experience of such inconsistency in security checks kind of shocks me. In the name of security our government has diminished some of our civil liberties, such as the right to freedom of speech and the expectation of privacy in e-mails and phone calls, such as the right to habeas corpus, a determination if your arrest and detention is legal. This in the name of safety. This in our fear of another terrorist attack. What is this about? We live in a society riddled with fear, yet we seem to address it in an almost irrational manner.
It is not news that humans live in fear; I dare say we always have. Life has its risks and fear is sometimes a very appropriate response. On an existential level, as self-conscious beings, we carry a basic fear of abandonment and loss. That is because we know we will die. That is because we learn, some of us much too early, that in our life times we will experience abandonment and loss. Our fear is a response to the reality of engagement with life. To the reality of our loving others. Fear is sometimes the price we pay for being alive.
At the same time as fear is the price, our fear also seeks to protect us from having to pay such a price; to protect us from loss, from pain, from harm. In the name of protection, fear tells us to stay away; don't touch; to build defenses; to attack before we ourselves are attacked; to shut down; to deny; to avoid; to anesthetize ourselves from feeling our feelings; to lie. How many of us have ever ignored physical symptoms of disease in the hopes that it would just go away? And in the fear that it would not? How many of us drink or drug or eat our difficulties away? Because we just don't want to know? How many of us, frightened at the thought of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Sadaam Hussein consented to the current war in Iraq? How many of us shut the doors of our souls? Out of fear, whether we recognize it as such or not. Fear tells us that it's better to be safe than sorry. (Thanks to Forrest Church for this observation.)
Our fear seeks to protect us and keep us safe, which is good and necessary. But fear cannot protect us from fear. Fear does not, ultimately, protect us or keep us safe. Fear causes us to become rigid and it closes our minds and hearts, which only gives rise to more fear. The opposite of fear is not fearlessness. The opposite of fear is love. (Church) Fear separates us; love connects us. Fear does not protect us, love does because love allows us to live with a certain acknowledgment of our vulnerability. Love allows us to live with the fact that we cannot be perfectly safe, and thereby we take some risk and survive it. Fear will never go away because on some level it is an appropriate response to the losses and chances of life. But we cannot be ruled by fear, not if we want to live.
Yet we live in a society saturated with fear both on the personal level and the national. We have a particular awareness of this since the attacks of 9/11, yet we Americans are no strangers to fear. Our governments, our media, elements of our culture have, in certain time periods, fed on fear and used it to manipulate and control the public. Just to cite some relatively recent examples: during the Cold War with Russia, articles in the Saturday Evening Post, a popular magazine, read in 1948 (3/6/48) "A Faint Blueprint for Peace." In 1951 (11/24/51), "How Close is War with Russia?" In 1954 (3/6/54), "The GI's Who Fell for the Reds' and in 1957 (5/25/57), "How Will America Behave if H Bombs Fall?" The fear was rampant. I remember as a teenager in the 1960's having nightmares when China announced it had the bomb. I was sure they would drop it squarely on me, in Ozone Park New York. No kidding.
Even earlier than this, Franklin Roosevelt, in his 1933 first inaugural address, recognizing the power of fear, uttered those famous words: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." The whole sentence is even better and it goes like this: "So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." In January of 1941 he laid out what he called the four "essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his (I add her) own way -- everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want -- which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough manner that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor -- anywhere in the world." (Thanks to Church for Roosevelt.)
We Americans are no strangers to fear and while there have been, and are, times in our history when we have succumbed to it, there have also been times when we have had leaders who have taught us how to counter it. The years following WWII have not been one of the latter periods. During those years we have experienced the fear of communism and that fear has manifested in the McCarthy hearings, the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War, covert operations in Central America, the growth of the political power of the Christian right and the nuclear arms race. The years since 9/11 have been particularly fearful ones, having provided us with a new enemy -- terrorism, which has left us almost consumed by anxiety for our safety. We go so far as to elect our leaders based upon the perceptions of who will keep us safe and in our anxiety we do not see that those perceptions are illusions.
Think about what we do and do not fear. And why. National fears play into personal fears for our safety. In San Francisco the odor of chocolate chip cookies was piped into bus terminals, a marketing device to sell cookies. Chocolate chip cookies--good, huh? No. People became so afraid of the unknown origin of the smell that it had to be stopped. We fear terrorism and we reject cookies. (Thanks to Davis for that example.) As Michael Moore pointed out in his film Bowling for Columbine, we fear for our security, so we carry more guns and behave more violently than almost any other peoples in the world. We fear for our economic security, which results in a hostility to immigrants despite the fact that it's a myth that immigrants take jobs away or consume an undue share of public services without paying any taxes.
Where does this come from? Our fears have been shaped and defined by this age of information which throws boatloads of specialized, unanalyzed and undigested facts at us all the time; by ever-increasing technology which puts all of this information at our finger tips all the time whether we want it there or not; by our government which uses fear to get votes for its own policies; by the media which seemingly loves to stir up fear with exaggerations and half-truths; by fundamentalist religions which look gleefully to an apocalyptic end of the world; by our educational system, through omission, which has not taught our children to adequately think for themselves, look beyond themselves, and to question. And by our own complicity in all of this.
Why do we not fear the increasing privatization of war? More than half of the foreign military presence in Iraq consists of paid contractors and they are beyond the reach of Iraqi law, meaning that they do whatever, with impunity. (www.salon.com October 7, 2007) There are more contractors there than US military personnel. Why do we not fear the failure, or disregard, or incompetence of all levels of government in the ongoing catastrophe of hurricane Katrina? Why do we not fear a for-profit health care system which has left 47 million people in this country (and probably more), to fend for themselves? Do we think we will not ultimately pay the costs of all this?
Christian theologian Walter Brueggeman has said that it is in the interests of those who profit in wealth and power from war, or other human misery, (and throughout history there have always been those who profit from such), it is in their interests to cultivate a culture of fear and keep the public anxious about its own safety and focused solely on its own private interests, thereby distracted from larger issues, leaving them free to continue to profit. If you don't do what I say, terrible things will happen. Trust me, I know best how to keep you safe. How dare you question my actions? As I sat in the Orlando airport on Wednesday I heard over and over again that we were in orange alert and we'd better watch our bags. Orange alert is only one step removed from red alert. Had something happened? Then, as I bought a cup of tea, I overheard some of the workers saying that, in Orlando, the airport, perennially crowded with tourists for Disney World, was always in orange alert. I wondered if the Port of Fort Lauderdale was also in orange alert. Hmmmmm.
Our lack of attention to issues beyond the personal, whether it be apathy, distraction or ignorance, causes us to fall back upon our own private emotional realities of fear and project them out into the world in ways that appear inconsistent and irrational. We either do not have or do not use the intellectual tools which would allow us to see a larger picture with a greater perspective, which would inform and influence our private fears. Instead we use our fear to protect us from what we fear and as I said earlier, that does not work. How then, do we counter this culture of fear?
*Pay attention to the wider world and we will see how much the rhetoric of exaggeration and catastrophizing permeates society, government, and media, stoking the fires of fear. Counter it with education and keeping ourselves informed with a larger perspective and an open mind. Question, for example, why threats to our safety are more important than threats to our civil liberties. Question our leaders when they would use the rhetoric of fear.
*Pay attention to the meaning we chose to make in our lives, and the purposes for which we chose to live. Ethics matter, both personally and nationally. Counter fear by living according to principles of morality. Question the consequences of the choices we make, individually and collectively.
*Pay attention and we will find our own personal fears, often wearing the masks of protectors. Identify them and look at them. Counter them by uncovering the ways in which we are blinded by that which we believe will protect us. Question whether it does.
*Pay attention to our own histories. Recall a time when we broke through fear. Counter our anxiety by recovering our sense of competence. Remember our sense of confidence and know that we can live with some ambiguity. We can live with some vulnerability. We can live with some risk of loss.
*Pay attention to other people. See how they handle adversity and fear. Counter our fear through inspiration from others. Question ourselves when we perceive that we have become rigid and closed.
*Pay attention to our faith, whether it is in ourselves, in other people, in god, however you understand that word, in spirit, in nature, and on. Counter fear through connections to something and someones larger than oneself. Open our hearts. Open our minds.
Fear exists as part of our human condition and it is a realistic response to the reality of engagement with life. Nevertheless, we cannot live as the slaves of fear because that only grows more fear, less engagement, diminished connections. It overshadows the presence of love in our lives and that does not help us.
May we counter our culture of fear. May we cultivate love; may we cultivate peace; may we cultivate joy. May we live generously and strongly, singing our song of praise and thanks for all that is our life. May it be so.