A Nation Armed To The Teeth But Living In Fear

By Dave Lindorff,
Courtesy Of "This Can't Be Happening"

The depths to which this nation has sunk in this miasma of mindless fear became apparent when President Obama, at both the first abysmal debate and the third, opened his remarks by declaring that it was his primary duty as president “to keep Americans safe.”

Huh?

I thought the primary responsibility of the president of the United States was to defend the Constitution. In fact, here’s the presidential oath:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Note that it doesn’t say anything in this oath of office about keeping Americans “safe.”

It’s our Constitution and our freedom that the president is supposed to be defending, not our safety!

Imagine President George Washington, or President Abraham Lincoln, saying that their “number one goal” was to “keep Americans safe”!

I was at a gathering of journalists last night -- the annual dinner of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship program. Actually it was a gathering of journalists, bankers, public relations executives and media tycoons, all of the latter of whom help to fund this program at Columbia University designed to train journalists to report on financial and economic affairs. A former director, Pauline Tai, from Hong Kong, an old friend, was talking with me and said that she was amazed in her visits back to the US, at how afraid Americans have become.

We remarked on how bizarre that was. America is far and away the most powerful nation in the world, favored in so many ways with abundant resources, with a diverse culture and population, and yet its people cower in fear -- fear of the outside world and, sadly, even fear of each other. People in Hong Kong aren’t afraid. People in Taiwan and China aren’t afraid, and yet objectively they all live in much more vulnerable places -- Hong Kong right next to a totalitarian government that could snuff out its civil liberties overnight, Taiwan under the threat of Chinese missiles just across a narrow strait -- missiles that were test fired into adjacent shipping lanes during a crisis in 1995. And China itself a kind of pressure cooker of public frustration and anger held at bay by a sclerotic Communist Party elite that doesn’t really know how to change and reform without losing its grip in an uncontrolled explosion.

The same can be said of much of the rest of the world, from what I have seen in my own travels. Look at Greece. It is seeing its economy destroyed and pillaged by the greedy demands of banks in northern Europe and by the governments of the more powerful economies in the European Union, yet far from cowering in fear, its people are fighting back in massive public demonstrations.

Americans, worried about their own country’s economic future, go out and buy more and bigger guns and huddle in their homes in fear of the future. And then they vote for politicians who tell them they should be afraid --whether of terrorists, "death panels" in Obamacare, a bankrupt Social Security program, the budget deficit, regulations, or a black president -- and who, to public applause, hand ever more power over to an intrusive and increasingly violent domestic police/army.

The worst thing about all this fear and fear-mongering is that it has turned the US into a nation of conspiracy theorists, so ready to believe the most far-fetched plots and schemes by the rich and powerful that we Americans are unable to see the real challenge facing not just us, but the entire world: the threat of catastrophic climate change. And that is a very real threat that cannot be avoided by cowering in a basement or by electing some tough-talking chief executive, or by buying guns. It can only be tackled by taking bold united action as a people to change the whole basis of the socio-economic system from one premised on encouraging wasteful consumption to one based upon utility and on bettering the lot of all as efficiently as possible -- and doing this not just as a nation, but in collaboration with the rest of the world.

It is time for Americans to reject the fear-mongering, and to take responsibility for our own society and government. We don’t need a leader who will “keep us safe.” We need a leader who will denounce fear, who will declare that the freedoms that are enshrined in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights are the foundation of this nation, and that we will rely on them, not police and armies, to move the country forward to face the real challenges of the future.