Ghouls and Goblins.
A year ago I was wearing a whistle around my neck when I walked the dog. I was spending an hour catching up on emails in a Home Depot parking lot while keeping watch over the small crowd of willing day-laborers gathered there. I was slowing down when I passed landscapers cleaning manicured lawns so I could see if there were unidentified vans lurking nearby. I was standing on the sidewalk on the perimeter of my son’s middle school as the students exited the building towards their buses, their parents’ cars, or their walking route home.
A year ago we were living as if besieged by werewolves, discouraging children from trick-or-treating with their families lest they be surrounded and whisked away by actual masked fiends.
Today we are two weeks from midterm elections and eleven days from Halloween, so it’s a pertinent moment to talk about fear.
I don’t mean the fear of the election results, although this is certainly an ever-present anxiety I confront on an hourly basis. I mean that we must take a moment to examine fear in its elemental form, to understand how it is manipulated before our eyes like a set of metal rings in a stage magician’s nimble fingers.
As you walk with the rest of us towards Election Day, remember this above all else:
Fear is All They Have.
The abiding tactics, strategy, ethos, and rhetoric of the Republican Party for almost as long as I’ve been politically aware has been to reach a single, fungus-ridden fingernail into the primitive part of your brain and press whatever button causes your dread to spike. They know this is the easiest way to make you react without consideration. They rely on your panic to maintain their own power.
So they tell you to be afraid, and once they’ve succeeded in doing so they feel empowered to offer you any absurd remedy that happens to strike their fancy. They tell you your job will vanish unless you send a Honduran shop owner back to Honduras, or to an El Salvadorean gulag, or to Uganda. They tell you that your children will be violated and murdered unless you craft ironclad legislation that protects public bathrooms and limits what people can wear when they read a book to an audience of kindergarteners at the public library.
Iran has a nuclear weapon aimed at your favorite restaurant. Venezuelan fishermen are putting fentanyl in the reservoir. Your Haitian neighbors are eating the dogs. The vaccines are filled with ground-up preemies and the history books are filled with lies that were put there to dishonor your ancestors.
You should buy a gun. You should buy two guns. You should buy three guns and eight thousand magazines of steel-jacketed magma bullets because right now there is a cackling cartel boss roasting the American flag upside-down in your driveway.
Buy now and we’ll throw in a free two-month supply of masculinity cream that helps you ignore the empty space at the core of your being.
The Republican Party is led by individuals who are afraid of their own discomfort and their looming mortality, and they project that upon you by telling you to shriek when a co-worker has added their pronouns to their email signature.
They do not have Optimism.
They do not have Curiosity.
They do not have Imagination.
They do not have Ideas.
They have Fear.
Fear is All They Have.
Stay courageous. Stay stalwart. Stay in line until you’ve been allowed to vote.
