Defense against the dark arts

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
August 4, 2013

We’re afraid of all the wrong things.

Sermon

In October of second grade we lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis. The teachers at the Mulberry Street Elementary School drill us on getting under our desks, crouching down on our knees, putting our hands over our heads. That was how we were to weather a nuclear missile attack. I was scared. At night I would listen in fear to every plane that flew overhead. I waited for the engines to sputter like they did in the movies when a plane dropped a bomb. I waited for the whistling sound of the bomb falling on Statesville, NC. Sometimes I pictured the bottom land where I rode horses burned and black. I saw myself wandering the streets not able to find my mama or my sister. Even then I knew dying wasn’t the worst of it. Children spend a lot of time being scared.

I was scared of bees, too. I’ve spoken about the time I opened the door of my mother’s station wagon while she was on the highway, ready to jump out because there was a bee buzzing against the window by my face.

Fear can serve a purpose – it moves us out of situations that might be dangerous. It spurs us to protect ourselves, keep deadlines, use discipline in our behavior. It can make us stupid, though. “Fear is the mind-killer,” goes the quotation from Frank Herbert’s Dune. ” rest of the quote: ” I must not fear. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

Some people like to be scared. Horror movies where scary men threaten beautiful women. Those movies wouldn’t work if the scary guy was threatening middle aged men, or ordinary looking people, or dogs. I’m not sure why we love to see beautiful people screaming. The news. Awful things happen. Horrors occur. Goodness happens, and humans help one another, but many factors go in to what stories are chosen for the news. I majored in political science, more particularly in the media at Duke, and we learned that one of journalism’s credos is “If it bleeds, it leads.” Good news just doesn’t sell papers, or generate clicks on the web site. Stations in the northeast run stories about how awful things are in the Southeast. Stations in the south run stories about how awful things are in the northern cities. Stories are most likely to be covered if the news people are there already, which is why the coasts figure prominently. News people love stories about themselves, so when the President doesn’t let the photographers follow him onto the golf course, you will have a couple of days worth of stories about that.

The stock central character in a lot of scary news stories is the black man. You see men of color being perp walked into the police station, you see their mug shots. When white collar criminals bring the world’s economy to the brink of collapse, none of them is photographed with their wrists cuffed, none of them is shown trying to escape police. Sometimes they are not prosecuted at all. This is a complex issue, but I want to point out how dangerous it is for black men, who can’t take a run at night, who get pulled out of their cars and rousted even a few days ago when their car is a police-issue black SUV and they are a New York City Police Chief, and who are in danger of being shot by law enforcement. The incident occurred as the NYPD is under fire for record numbers of pedestrians being stopped and frisked, the majority of them black or Hispanic. Some 145,098 people were stopped by the NYPD in the first quarter of this year.

Now we black men and we families of black men have to be worried that we will be shot by neighborhood watch people with guns. Our stereotypes can be deadly.

Another scary character is “the government.” I know a woman who says the government has wave machines that send waves over crowded places to lower the electromagnetic vibrations of the people so they will be angrier, more fearful, thus more easily controlled. She’s very nice, but that’s nuts. No government I’ve known has been that sneaky or well organized. Some people say that the media are keeping us scared so we won’t look at the corporate culture that eats up our family lives by making us work harder and harder, our culture that plagues middle class families with consumer debt because our minds are controlled to work more, work more, to buy more, buy more. I think that is giving the media too much credit for organization and malice.

People make money on our fears of someone breaking into our houses, even though we are much more likely to be hurt by the other people locked into those houses with us. They make money on our fear of identity theft, and it happens, but we’re more likely to ruin our own credit and good name than someone else is.

All of us have fears. Some of them serve their purpose, but some of them get stuck, and they are changing our chemistry, shortening our lives without doing us any good. Sometimes they make the thing we’re scared of worse. I raised two children on not very much money, so I got scared of bills. I just stopped opening them. That did not make them go away. In fact, that fear of opening mail cost me money.

Some practical suggestions on how to be brave. Some coaches suggest you keep an imaginary room in your mind where you keep outfits that will help you. You go in there and put on the accountant’s suit, and do your bills. You put on the fencer’s uniform and mask and go into the business meeting. You put on your wizard’s robes and sit down to write your book.

A less fanciful suggestion is made by (oddly) Merlin, in The Once and Future King. You heard me tell the children. Learn more about it. If you get a bad diagnosis, learn all you can about it. If you have to go through bankruptcy, learn all you can about it. If you are afraid of a certain kind of people, learn what you can about some individuals in that group. Some people are scary, but you can’t tell the scary ones by what group they’re in.

The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”

Many people are afraid of terrorists in our country, and we should definitely defend ourselves against terrorism, but when you learn a little about it, you learn that:

You are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist

You are 8 times more likely to die from accidental electrocution than from a terrorist attack

You are 6 times more likely to die from hot weather than from a terrorist attack

Number of persons killed on American soil so far this year by terrorists: 3.

Number of persons killed on American soil so far this year by toddlers: 5.

We are scared of our children being gunned down at school, or being killed in a terrorist attack. Horribly, it happens. But learn more. We lose 5 children a day in the US in abuse-related deaths. We are scared to walk at night in our neighborhoods, scared to hike in the woods alone. We are scared to die by the hand of someone breaking into our home and murdering us.

We are scared to be killed by ricin or anthrax. So know this: We will be more likely be killed by driving too fast or eating too much fat or sitting on the couch night after night, resolving to exercise rather than actually exercising.

Here is what I am thinking. We’re scared of the wrong things. We lock our car doors and take our kids home to where the guns are. We tell them all about being wary of strangers, and we forget to tell them about protecting themselves from uncles and cousins. We don’t let our neighbors into our lives and shut ourselves off so there is no one to turn to when we’re in trouble. We are scared of people who are different from us, we don’t want to know them, we worry that they want to rob or rape us, we’re also worried that lunging to lock the car door will hurt their feelings.

Isolation is greatly to be feared, but our fears keep us alone. Ignorance is greatly to be feared, but our fears keep us at home, associating only with folks of our same nationality, class and color. Rigidity is greatly to be feared, but our fears keep us from bending, growing, changing in a supple way. Missing life is greatly to be feared, but our fears lock us down into a narrowness of experience that sucks the marrow from our bones and leaves us dried up husks in nice brick homes with satisfactory retirement funds. Looking like a fool is greatly to be feared, but our fears make us keep silent when we should speak up and talk to much when we should be quiet. Yeah, we are scared of all the wrong things.

If you find yourself afraid of something, get to know it. check out its reality. Do some research.

Get to know yourself. Don’t ignore the violence in your own heart. Or in your own home.

Take the anti-racism course here in the fall. Increase your cultural competency. Practice seeing individuals rather than members of a group.

Encourage people not to be afraid. Even being afraid of Cancer doesn’t help. Many people overestimate their odds of getting it, and studies show that the greater a person’s fear is, the less likely they are to go to the doctor for timely diagnosis and treatment..

Take a small action to make things better. Most of you are doing that already. If you want a way to do it, talk to me or to Jack, our Social Concerns chair, and we will try to set you up. Refuse to be afraid. Refuse to be afraid.

Take a small action to make things better. Most of you are doing that already Refuse to stay afraid. Refuse to stay afraid.

Fearing Paris
by Marsha Truman Cooper

Suppose that what you fear
could be trapped
and held in Paris.
Then you would have
the courage to go
everywhere in the world.

All the directions of the compass
open to you,
except the degrees east or west
of true north
that lead to Paris.

Still, you wouldn’t dare
put your toes
smack dab on the city limit line.
You’re not really willing
to stand on a mountainside,
miles away,
and watch the Paris lights
come up at night.

Just to be on the safe side
you decide to stay completely
out of France.
But then the danger
seems too close
even to those boundaries,
and you feel
the timid part of you
covering the whole globe again.

You need the kind of friend
who learns your secret and says,
“See Paris First.”

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776