Facing Fears
When I first heard Barack Obama speak at the 2004 Democratic convention I turned to my kids and told them to watch him now, because one day he would be running for President. Earlier this year, before I’d made up my mind which candidate to support, I confessed to my middle son that as much as I liked Barack Obama, every time I heard him speak, my painful childhood memories of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, JFK’s funeral (with little Caroline and John looking on) and Martin Luther King’s funeral flooded back. Obama has so many of the same qualities they had – idealism peppered with a dash of realism, hope, an amazing gift for inspiring and mobilizing support, and most of all, practical ideas to begin putting our country back together. He is clearly the right voice at the right time and I knew it. But I was afraid.
With typical 18-year old wisdom, my son replied flatly, “Being afraid of what happened 40 years ago is no reason to hold back from voting for him now. Do you want fear to control my future?” I had no argument, because he was right. What I was confronting was my best and worst case scenario blended into one. 4 years later, here I was waffling on my own prediction because I was afraid for him, for us, of the world we live in where invective is shot as rapidly as gunfire, and nearly as often.
Nick Antosca at the Huffington Post makes the same argument but addressing another kind of fear, the fear of “the different”.
There are opportunities we regard with interest, even with longing, that it ultimately seems more comfortable to turn down. We turn them down because of their unfamiliarity, because we are afraid of the risks involved, or because a more conventional path once seemed inevitable and we had already resigned ourselves to it.
The antidote to fear is recognizing the opportunity in what lies ahead:
Right now, progressive American voters have an opportunity to nominate a presidential candidate who signifies a repudiation of the politics of war, entitlement, and dour incrementalism. Barack Obama is a unifying figure; his erudition and charismatic intellect–profound nourishment after the barren Bush years–make him the candidate best equipped to represent us to the world, but it’s the sense that his proclamations of empathy and hope are authentic that draws crowds of 13,000, 18,000, and 20,000 people and causes his poll numbers to surge wherever voters become familiar with him–while his opponent’s numbers stagnate.
If Maria Shriver and Caroline Kennedy can set aside their fear because of the great hope Mr. Obama offers, it seems cowardly for me to continue to harbor those fears. Yet, when I see him walk into those stadiums full of cheering people, a little shiver runs up and down my spine — memories, even 40-year old memories, are hard to shake, particularly when my own family suffered a shattering loss at the hands of a gunman just three short years later. Still, they’re not enough to deter me from looking at the opportunity we have in front of us and grasping it with hope, and optimism.
Katharine remarked on my “Yes You Can” post on the other blog that this country has been depressed, perhaps not economically, but emotionally, since 9/11, the Iraq war, Afghanistan, and the constant barrage of messages sent to us that we should live in fear, that being afraid should be part of our national psyche, that control should replace transparency, that subterfuge should substitute for dialogue, and that above all, we as a people were helpless to do anything (other than shop, if you listen to George Bush).
We have an opportunity to shed that cloak of fear, face it head-on, and repair ourselves and our collective emotional health when we vote on Tuesday. Casting a vote for Barack Obama is the first step in facing our fear and learning to hope. Yes, we can.
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