Curiosity or Fear

How did we get here? I can’t help but ask myself as I look around the state of the world. A growing sense of dread fills me as I listen to the voices on TV talk about the future and what we should have done different. The talk is all the same. We should be more like them. We should sell out our principles and accept that the radical left ideas we hold dear are not welcome here. The radical ideas, such as loving our neighbor as we love ourself, accepting those who are different than us. These ideas have no place in a civilized society.

We must all conform to the norms that are deemed acceptable to those in power, for they know what is best. Never mind the fact that so many of the values that we hold close to our hearts were taught to us by people who now follow the status quo. How is it that we can be so wrong in our understanding of the lessons they taught us? They do not see how their betrayal of their own values breaks our hearts. It tears at us in ways both great and small.

Each passing day, as I see where we are headed as a society, as a people, fills me with less hope. History is ripe with examples of where our actions lead, yet no one in power wishes to see the harsh truth; that a madman who is the living embodiment of all that is wrong with monopoly, took the presidency as his get out of jail free card.

Took the presidency, that would imply he stole it. The truth is so much worse. We gave it to him. We ignored all his hate, all his bile, and we gave him the most powerful position in the world. Not because he deserved it, but because to do otherwise would mean opening the door to others. Would mean growing and evolving as a people, and we can’t have that.

Change is scary. It is the one thing that uproots everything in our lives at a moments notice, with no regard to if we are ready for it or not. Yet it is also, ironically enough, the only constant in our lives. Everything is always changing. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worst, but always changing. Shifting, taking us in directions we never thought we would go, never thought we would want to go. Who we are at the end of the journey is almost never who we were when the adventure began, and that is the point. To grow is to change. And grow we must.

An orange man with a heart filled with hate sold us on the lie that to be better we have to go back. He filled our airwaves with a message of fear, a fear of others, of people who want to come and steal from us. Take what is ours and make it theirs. He sold us a tale of educators who wished nothing more than to pervert our children into something other than what we wish of them. Of books that could summon the dreaded change and corrupt the mind of those we most love. Fear and hate. Those were the messages he used to rise in power and become our ruler. And we accepted those messages into our hearts, because otherwise we would have to go forward, into the unknown.

The unknown, the future. The point in time we are headed to whether we wish to be or not. We can not slow the progress of time, only the progress of our hearts and minds. We can hide in the past, in some version of events that we deem better through the mirror of nostalgia, or we can attempt to become the version of ourselves that they wished to become. The history of the world isn’t a history of people standing still, or going backwards, it is a history of people marching forward. Of embracing the unknown and welcoming it into their lives.

​When did we lose our sense of adventure? Our thrill at the ever-changing landscape around us? When did we as a people trade curiosity for fear as our defining characteristic? And how do we change it back?