Tag: fear

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The Drain, by Gillian

Searching Google, as I so often do, for inspiration on this topic, I was surprised to see one of the first things to come up was a pop music group of some unknown (to me, at least) variety called The Drain. This has happened amazingly often with our topics. There are apparently, for example, groups called Magic, Guilty Pleasures, Culture Shock and Did It My Way, all topics on which we have written. There is also one called Horseshoes and Hand Grenades. We have only written on the first part of that, so maybe we should tackle Hand Grenades one of these days.

Tricky things, drains. In the northern hemisphere liquid rotates clockwise as it disappears down a drain; in the southern hemisphere it circles in a counterclockwise motion. We all know that this is simply a function of the rotation of the earth, and yet everyone seems to be fascinated by this one fact of life. Anyone, going for the first time to the other hemisphere, just can’t wait to gaze raptly into the bathroom sink to see the water draining in that unaccustomed direction. Yes, it suckered me too, though at the moment of truth, all I could come up with was ‘huh!’

So; tricky things, drains. Like many things, we only recognize the true value of them when they cease to do their job. They are designed to consume material, but on occasion they refuse , or even regurgitate, instead. We’ve all seen times in Denver when the storm drains, blocked by fallen autumn leaves or overwhelmed by the occasional gully-washer downpour, simply refuse to digest the requisite amount of water and leave it to flood intersections and underpasses, and many people say much more than, ‘huh!’

There is little more nauseating then the indescribably disgusting gray goo which has to be extricated from the bend in the pipe when the sink drain refuses to absorb anything further.

Did that stuff really come from me? Huh! The horrors from which our drains habitually save us!

At the time that I left the U.K. in the early ’60’s, the whole country was suffering from what was termed a ‘brain drain’ – so many with higher education left for other countries as Britain offered so few opportunities. One arm of that drain, however, has always run the other way. In the Britain of my youth it seemed as if almost every doctor was from India, and on once again checking with Google, I find that the situation has not much changed. Those from India still provide the largest number of non-British-born doctors and health professionals in Britain, and, in fact, the National Health Service is currently actively recruiting doctors from India. The current fear, however, is that since the Brexit vote with it’s associated real or imagined rise in xenophobia, doctors from India and indeed any other country will be unwilling to commit themselves to a move to the U.K. With a mere 37% of all doctors in Britain currently being British-born white, this does not bode well. Tricky things, drains.

Since the recent U.S. election, many of the same concerns are being voiced here, where more than 25% of all doctors are foreign-born, again, incidentally, with an incredible 10% of all our doctors being from India. There are roughly a million foreign students in our universities, many of whom will remain to contribute greatly to the country. But with the new atmosphere of just about every kind of ism and phobia imaginable, will students from other countries still want to come? Will they feel safe? I can only suppose probably not. This would almost certainly be true of many other potential immigrants except for those sad souls driven by an even greater fear of life in their place of origin. Trump talks of limiting immigration and deporting many of those already here, but if he reverses the flow of that drain, blocking the incoming and increasing the outgoing, our country will be sadly poorer for it. Tricky things, drains.

Now our future leader talks of ‘draining’ the swamp of the Washington establishment – something many of us would not find discouraging. Cleaning up the quagmire of dark money and general corruption and lies, to replace it with clean fresh honest air, who would argue? Sadly, any vision we might have had of an outward-flowing drain was swiftly dispelled. No, the drain flows in.

And with it it brings a new level of homophobia, racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism the likes of which most of us never saw coming in our worst nightmares. But we can stop the flow. We can reverse it. With constant vigilance, not to mention a lot of hard work, we can do it. Just don’t forget, Donald – tricky things, drains.

© November 2016

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.

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Security, by Will Stanton

A person’s sense of security or insecurity may be based upon realistic concerns, concerns such as feeling the need to minimize the possibility of home-break-in, avoiding dangerous locales within cities, or perhaps concerns about local terrorism. In many cases, there are some rational steps people possibly can take to provide a greater sense of security.

There is for me, however, a concern (and this is a concern that progressively has worried me over the years), about a more subtle and perhaps even more dangerous sense of insecurity that plagues certain kinds of people and, consequently, society as a whole. That chronic sense of insecurity may warp those people’s emotions and thinking, resulting in actions that are harmful to others and to the society in which they live.

As I have stated several times earlier, there are various ways that people feel, think, and behave, part of that being based upon what they may have learned from their life-experiences, plus part of that literally based upon how their brains are structured physically. For example, everyone is a mixture of rational thinking and emotions. Research shows, however, that there always has been a group of people who appear to be much more prone to emotional responses and less rational, open-minded thinking. As a potentially terrible consequence, such people are more easily manipulated by devious people with harmful intentions. Also, they become very tribal, work together, often with anger and “fire in the belly,” making them too often more politically effective than more cerebral, better informed people.

Manipulating people’s fear and sense of insecurity has been around ever since the creation of humankind, and I have seen much of that over the last several decades here in America, notably in politics. Whereas it appears to me that one of the major political parties contains a good percentage of people who are open-minded, search for facts, try to think rationally about them, and to form logical, constructive conclusions, there is another major party, with much evidence I might add, that contains a large percentage of people who are more prone to fear, hate, and anger. Consequently, some politicians have mastered the craft of manipulating these people to side with them, to support them, even to the extent that the people vote against their own best interests. These voters not only form opinions that are against what is good for them and society as a whole, but they do so with great emotion, even abject anger against other persons who have formed more rational opinions.

I always have been a student of history, which has taught me lessons about human thinking and behavior. One of the most striking lessons I have learned is from a very revealing quotation from one of the most notorious individuals of modern history, a quotation and lesson that certainly are a warning to what is occurring today here in America. What this person said, along with my comments about each part of it, should ring an alarm bell.

This monster of history was asked how he was able to so control the masses of people in his country. To start with, he maintained that most people are ignorant. Now immediately, some of us might respond that this assertion is an overstatement; yet I ask everyone to recall how ignorant people were shown to be when Jay Leno went on the street and asked simple questions of many people, including graduate students, teachers, businessmen, and even government officials. Need I also mention the recent Republican so-called debates?

Even more harshly, the political leader stated that most people are stupid. Now, I know that this term too frequently is used simply as a slur to denigrate people, yet I have noted for many years that certain people do seem to lack the ability to think rationally. I occasionally over thirty years have tested an acquaintance of mine to ascertain whether or not he can follow simple processes of logical thinking; and, truthfully, he never has. He always responds in irrational, emotional ways, so much so that his thinking is very distorted. I recall in the year 2000 during the Presidential election, this individual actually wrote a letter to the Republican National Committee stating, “If Al Gore steals this election, I volunteer to lead the first tanks into Washington.” In addition to his statement being dramatically irrational, it is quite ironic, now that there is strong evidence that the theft actually was the other way around.

The notorious quotation goes on to state that all the leader had to do was to employ (first of all) fear, and we have witnessed in the U.S. how effective fear-mongering by certain political leaders has been over several decades, stirring up the citizens and priming them for manipulation. “Let us political leaders, along with the top one percent, do whatever we want, and we will make you secure.”

Secondly, he also utilized hate by demonizing certain peoples based upon race, religion, sexual orientation, political beliefs, etc.; and those persons today who are easy prey to such manipulation increasingly express opinions and beliefs that can be quite shocking and unsettling to those of us who have more empathetic, civilized beliefs. In this way, the manipulators can misdirect the public’s attention away from the real problems and constructive solutions by blaming everything on other groups unlike themselves.

And thirdly, he employed anger, and we have seen both verbal and physical violence as a result. This certainly was horrifyingly true in his time and his country. Here in the U.S. in the recent Republican debates and town-hall meetings, we have seen anger too often expressed among the candidates and audience. Several times now in Donald Trump rallies, we even saw violence against dissenters and journalists. One Trump supporter even shouted out, “Sieg heil!” Such violence can spread throughout society as a whole, rather like metastasized cancer. For example, at the beginning of the 20th century, one of the two most spoken languages in the U.S. was German, the language of a large portion of our emigres, along with it being the language of medicine and science. Yet, with the advent of the Great War, suddenly German-Americans were hated. The German language unthinkingly was banned in all schools. Shop-keepers of German heritage had their windows smashed, and others were physically beaten. During World War II, many innocent Japanese, Italian, and German families were sent to prison camps, the German families being the last to be released.

Now we see such fear, hate, and anger being directed toward Mexicans and Muslims, among others. (I suppose certain people always will fear and hate homosexuals). My belief is that the more knowledgeable one becomes, the more rational one’s thinking, the more empathetic and understanding of others, then the more secure one becomes in his own mind. A lack of a sense of security too often is within people’s minds, not necessarily within the real world.

© 02 March 2016

About the Author

I have had a life-long fascination with people and their life stories. I also realize that, although my own life has not brought me particular fame or fortune, I too have had some noteworthy experiences and, at times, unusual ones. Since I joined this Story Time group, I have derived pleasure and satisfaction participating in the group. I do put some thought and effort into my stories, and I hope that you find them interesting.

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Lonely Places by Betsy

There are so many lonely places one
could write about, I find it difficult to settle on one of them.  Probably the loneliest for me would be
loneliness of the heart, such as having a secret about oneself–something one
is terrified to disclose–that’s a very lonely place indeed.
Fear makes a person feel very
lonely–fear of violence, abuse, hunger, thirst, etc. I imagine this to be a
very lonely state of being.  Some are
fearful of being physically alone. They want to be surrounded by people–any
people– all the time.  This also must be
an agonizingly lonely person.
I imagine hatred would contribute to a
person’s feeling of loneliness as well. I believe for humans the natural state
of being is to love not to hate. Hatred is a creation of the human mind and is
not “natural.”
These are all states of being.  Right now I am thinking about an actual
place.
Because I have recently returned from
a visit to the state of Alaska I am thinking of a place most of us have never
visited, a place that appears to be very lonely. Most of the area of the state
of Alaska is a vast wilderness uninhabited by humans. The population of the
state is around 732,000.  That’s in the
entire state of 663,268 square miles an area almost one quarter the size of the
continental United States.  More than
half these 700,000 people live in the cities of Anchorage, Fairbanks, and
Juneau.  The other half are scattered in
towns, villages, or solitary homes, many of them reachable only by airplane or
boat.  Alaska is the largest state in
area in the U.S. and ranks 47th in population making it the least densely
populated state with only 1.26 people per square mile.  I imagine that living in the bush in Alaska
would be a very lonely existence for most folks used to living in a world of
people. But there are many people who live in the bush and live off the land by
choice. Perhaps they were born there and their parents lived there, or maybe
they just landed there and loved it and decided to stay. In some remote
villages a piece of fruit such as one orange can cost $5.00.  You would HAVE to live off the land in these
circumstances.
Alaska’s road system covers only a
small area of the state linking the central population centers of Anchorage and
Fairbanks and the Alaska Highway, the route out of the state through Canada.
The state capital of Juneau is not accessible by road only by car ferry.  The northern and western part of Alaska have
no road system connecting the communities with the rest of the state. 
I try to imagine living in the bush
hundreds of miles from the nearest town. Most of the people living in the bush
live in tiny villages or a group of some sort. 
But I know there are some who live by themselves, alone, in such a
place–and by choice.  This would seem
like a very lonely place to many of us, but clearly not to those who live such
an existence.
I imagine them to be so well
integrated into their environment that they never have a sense of
aloneness.  They actually are not
alone–being so completely ONE with your environment I imagine would not feel
lonely.
Loneliness is most definitely a state
of mind and relative to one’s situation. 
In a way it could be very lonely to think of ourselves, us Earthlings,
as alone in the universe, not knowing who may or may not be out there, where they
are, who they are, how close they are, are they there at all.  On the other hand when I think of myself as
PART of the universe, it doesn’t seem lonely at all.  I guess that’s how it is for the lone
Alaskan, family, or even a community of Alaskan’s living in the bush.  They know they are a PART of the natural
conditions in which they live since their very lives depend so totally on those
conditions.
I do not believe that the lonely
states of being mentioned above–fear, hatred, secretive living, I do not
consider living in such a state to be living in tune with one’s natural
environment, immediate surroundings or the Universe for that matter. So perhaps
we humans create our own lonely places. 
Perhaps there really are no lonely places except as creations of our
minds.
I’ll have to give this more
thought.  But for starters I like
thinking about being in tune with my surroundings, my environment, whatever it
may be–being in tune or being at ONE–I like to think of this as the way we
are meant to live. I like to think of being in tune as a source of contentment
and peace–the antithesis of feeling as if we live in a lonely place.
©
11 August 2014 
About the Author 

 Betsy has been active in the
GLBT community including PFLAG, the Denver women’s chorus, OLOC (Old Lesbians
Organizing for Change).  She has been
retired from the Human Services field for about 15 years.  Since her retirement, her major activities
include tennis, camping, traveling, teaching skiing as a volunteer instructor
with National Sports Center for the Disabled, and learning.  Betsy came out as a lesbian after 25 years of
marriage. She has a close relationship with her three children and enjoys
spending time with her four grandchildren. 
Betsy says her greatest and most meaningful enjoyment comes from sharing
her life with her partner of 25 years, Gillian Edwards.