Fear is our Friend

(A post by D-Jay)

One of my friends is a Major in the Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force and the commander of a 120-man infantry company.  They do a LOT of training, including some very dangerous activities such as jumping out of airplanes and rappelling down sheer cliffs.  When they are embarking on such an exercise, he always tells his soldiers, “Fear is our friend!” 

It’s the thing that ensures you check your parachute carefully to make sure it will deploy and that you are connected properly to the rope before launching yourself down the cliff.  You can’t let yourself be overcome by your fear, he tells his troops – but it is a natural reaction to danger, and you should learn to use it.

Good advice. 

And so different from what we hear from our own clownish commander-in-chief.

Cowardly blowhard that he is, he tries to overcompensate by loudly proclaiming that we don’t need to fear Covid-19 – a deadly disease that has already killed over 210,000 Americans and left who knows how many hundreds of thousands more with a wide range of serious impairments of as-yet undetermined duration. 

There is a good reason that the fight or flight impulse is hard wired into our genetic code.  Dangerous things SHOULD be feared.  Children need to learn not to touch a hot stove.  And even the most bombastic great ape alpha male knows better than to stand there and thump his chest when an enraged rhinoceros is bearing down on him full speed.

To bad he has so much more sense than our president.

We SHOULD be afraid of the coronavirus and make the appropriate countermeasures second-nature.  We are horrified to think of all the thousands of people who will now die because they take Trump’s latest – and maybe worst yet – deranged nonsense seriously.

Shame on you, Donald.

Shame.

But those of us who haven’t lost our minds have another fear – worse even that that of Covid-19.  It’s the fear of what will happen to our country and the world if you remain president for another four years.  Let’s hope this fear generates so many votes against you that all your anti-democratic schemes to steal the election will be crushed.

Fear is our friend…but you are not.