I mean if Michelle Obama, now First Lady to Pres. Barack Obama in the USA, back in Aug. 2007 was feeling afraid, and they lived a very comfortable life, you can imagine what the vast majority of the American population was feeling. She spoke to supporters in rural Iowa in regard to why she and her husband agreed to go for the presidency:
"And as more people talked to us about it, the question came up again and again, what people were most concerned about. They were afraid. It was fear. Fear again, raising its ugly head in one of the most important decisions that we would make. Fear of everything. Fear that we might lose. Fear that he [Barack] might get hurt. Fear that this might get ugly. Fear that it would hurt our family. Fear
You know the reason I said 'yes'? Because I am tired of being afraid. I am tired of living in a country where every decision that we have made over the last ten years wasn't for something, but it was because people told us we had to fear something. We had to fear people who looked different than us, fear people who believed in things that were different from us, fear of another right here in our own backyards. I am so tired of fear, and I don't want my girls to live in a country, in a world, based on fear." [1]
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Wow! I hadn't seen this or heard this speech by her. It really hits the soul of things, and trust a woman to say it like it is in this realm of the affective side of life--living in a culture of fear that has truly not been anything but growing for quite a long time, and especially after 9/11. You'd think this would be the "grist" for the mill of American society, and especially American education systems to get out the best of our intelligence and figure out why it is that everyone is so afraid of everything down here!
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End Note:
1. Excerpt of Michelle Obama's speech, taken from Glassner, B. (2009). The culture of fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things. NY: Basic Books, 243-44.
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