Fear Destroys - Values Empower All

A group of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and other faiths and peoples in Gainesville are creating an interfaith service both to remember 9-11, and to counter the planned burning of the Quran by another group in Gainesville. They have stood up for peace. Read their Statement on Peace and Understanding here. (There are also details for any who want to attend the service.)

Which group would you be in . .. and why?

I would definitely be at the interfaith service in solidarity with people who recognize our common humanity, our common goals of a better world for ourselves, others, and future generations. I would be there because it is about peace, about respect, about honoring difference while remembering what connects us. It’s about healthy relationship – being able to have a unique self that can be connected to another unique self without having to make that person or group into a clone of ME.

Prejudice is the product of a small life grounded in fear. And as Roosevelt said so eloquently, “The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.”

Fear puts our brains into self-protection at all costs, irregardless of the damage it causes those around us. Instead of acting from our core self, we act from armored rigidity. Fear also makes our brains believe the ‘other’ is our enemy set out to destroy us. As history has shown us over and over again, when we demonize the ‘other’, it is the first step toward rationalizing doing harm to them. We view ‘them’ with contempt and see them as ‘less than’. Somehow destroying ‘them’ and what matters to them is twisted into the new ‘right’. Dragging God and religion into it twists what is about being good, loving, building peace, creating justice, honoring those who are different from you, into some kind of mandate to destroy ‘otherness’. We see it terrorism. We saw it with Hitler. We see it with hate groups in our own country. We see it in burnings of what is holy to someone else. We see it in the Middle East, Africa and in our own wars. We see it in politics.

But before you and I jump to exclude ourselves from fear based groups, we need to look at ourself and our own relationships. We see fear-based patterns in marriages, families and workplaces – demonizing the other and reacting from fear instead of from who we are in our core. "He/she is the problem" , , ,"I can't do anything until he/she/it changes". . . "he/she is crazy (unpatriotic, those liberals, those right-wingers, etc) That drains our energy, resources and our ability to creatively build a better world for ourselves and others and perpetuates the cycle of fear-based living and relating.

I believe another element that intensifies this demonizing trend, both in groups and in individuals, is a sense of powerlessness. It is that place we tell ourselves we can’t change against ‘them’ and make ourselves into helpless victims. We hand over our personal power and choice to our fear and to external circumstances instead of drawing on our core values and the best of who we are.

What is the remedy?
I think there are several elements – probably the topics of several future posts! But one is remembering who we are and the kind of human being we long to become -- and living more deeply from THAT part of us. Another is holding a vision of a better world for all people, including, but not limited to us. Another is drawing on the deep ethical or religious values of peace, justice, compassion, respect – even when we disagree. It is reclaiming our personal power – that while we cannot always control external circumstances, we do have choice about the meaning we give it, and how we respond to it. Many people in extermination camps in Hitler’s campaign to destroy ‘otherness’ held on to their core, found meaning in life in the face of horror, and never let hatred and the acts of others destroy or take away who they were as human beings.

May we all, individuals, groups and countries, live more each day from that greatness that is within us.

Tell us your ‘remedies’!