The colors of fear

The colors of fear. We all like to think that fear and courage is all about facing great danger, loss of live and limb. Going to war. Running onto a file. Is this true courage? Do these young people really know what they are doing? Dying is so abstract when you are young. Living as a cripple is a remote possibility, not taken seriously. Why is it so much easier to jump into a war than to tell your parents you are gay? How about telling your new girlfriend that you pick your nose? Is real courage to be found in facing the day-to-day dangers that we all are intimately familiar with? Asking for a raise, asking for a date? Telling your mother you lost your job, or your father you’re quitting the school he paid for to be a hobo? Or maybe just admitting that you don’t really know what you are doing? Or that you just made a really big mistake?

We are all expected to have our lives planned out by the time we are sixteen. Choose a carreer in high school, get into the right college, get the right job, and then what? Work your way up the ladder? Make great discoveries? Start the next dot-com? What if that’s not what you want or are any good at? How could you possibly know that at sixteen? But you’re pushed from every side to choose something anyway and after you’ve chosen, you are stuck. Like it or not. How many of us had the courage to ignore that? Did we just go along for a while before dropping out? Or did we go all the way and finish our schooling, only to do something completely different after graduation? Or do absolutely nothing?

What’s the deal here? You can’t get any job without extensive schooling, so you have to start very early? Parents are afraid that kids won’t do well without all the right advantages? Society is afraid of what people will do if they can make their own choices? Are we all afraid of what might happen if we don’t live this strange model where our only choices in life are laid out for us before we are born? We talk so much about freedom and the ability to chose one’s own destiny, but why we are forced to “choose” our lives in such a state of youth and ignorance that there is no possibility of making nay kind of intelligent choice?

Why is there no time to understand what you are getting into? Why are we so afraid to let people learn something about what life is about when you make your own decisions, before we make the big choices? Why do we keep pretending that you choose once and then you are done, forever? Are we so jaded and disillusioned by our lives and mess we’ve made that we can’t allow our children to have it any better? Would that would just rub our noses in the collective mess we’ve made? We were too foolish to break from the mold, so we’ll be dammed if we let them do it either?

Are we so brainwashed that we can’t see how pointless the cycle of birth-life-death is, if the whole point is nothing but making money and babies until you die? Do we see the silliness of spending the first part our lives training for jobs, then spend the rest of our lives seeking ways to get away from those same jobs, physically and psychologically? Are we so afraid of God, Jews, arabs, poor people, LGBTs, the mentally ill, blacks, whites, latinos, anyone who looks different, thinks different, or drives a different car that the only solution is to fight with them, kill them, steal from them, freeze them out of our neighborhood, our workplaces, our churches, or lives?

Being afraid is giving up. It’s giving up our power, our choices, our lives to a faceless “they” that we can never escape. Being afraid is easy. Blame is easy. They are both comfortable. Live in fear and blame and there are no choices to be made, nothing to do but sit around and complain. Giving up fear and blame gives us our lives back, but then we have to make choices. Choices can be hard, we could be wrong, but without choice, we are dead.

Do extreme sports, and you get a rush that lasts for a few minutes, at best. You like the thrill of danger? Come out, publicly, in church, tell your boss you quit, drop everything and re-educate yourself to follow your passion. Stand up for human rights in an oppressive country, or in this country. Publicly put your ass on the line fighting for the rights of the disadvantaged. Want to feel alive? Start with the assumption that everything you’ve been taught is a bunch of crap, and see where that takes you. Ignore what you are “supposed” to do and choose!