Given the choice, I’ll take fear over apathy every time

A loser strategy

The present Trumpcare debate, ostensibly about health care, conceals more fundamental and problematic issues. Because of the political criminality and economic irrationality embedded in our system, we’re hitting the limits of growth. That’s why Congress is debating the rationing of health care: There are not enough resources available.

Those who lose their health care access under Trumpcare will be those with the least political power —the weak, the sick and lower-income households. Some of us may protest that these are immoral choices but despite much pious rhetoric from our politicians, morality will have zero influence on the Trumpcare debate. It’s all about money and the limits to growth. When it comes to legislation, these days greed and secular ideologies trump the words of Christ every time.

We could have health care for everyone, but that isn’t going to happen. Too many people make too much money off of politicized medical and insurance systems for any rational and just health care system to pass legislative muster. Obamacare had flaws and certainly needed some changes, but Trumpcare’s radical health care rationing is a loser strategy on a national scale. If this is the best we can do with health care, the ash heap of history looms before us.

Work extends beyond floor

Regarding “Five-day workweeks are rare at the state Capitol” (Our Views, March 13): I’m no supporter of laziness or politicians who don’t care about constituents. However, the unwritten assertion that because the Legislature is not at work on the floor that legislators aren’t working does not ring true. There is research to be done, bills to be written, bills to be read and time spent on constituents’ needs. Factor that in, and that our Legislature is purposely not a full-time job, and then you have a better picture. Also, consider there would be the addition of night(s) away from constituents and families as well as a larger cost to taxpayers for an extra night or two at hotels for those lawmakers who live and work hours away from our Capitol.

Bad practices

Regarding Gayle Ferioli’s letter (Your Views, March 10): Presuming there are a minimum of 250,000 property owners in Oklahoma County, if each would pay $2 extra on taxes for one year, the $500,000 Oklahoma County lawsuit settlement would be paid in full. Why would this need to be a three-year penalty as described in the original announcement? Here again is some of that “fuzzy math” I do not understand.

Sadly, governmental spending (be it city, county, state or federal) does not show any of the budget balancing, required restraint, and logical accounting that private businesses and individuals must employ daily to stay solvent.

The answer to governmental “surprise” costs, shortfalls and deficits is to automatically seek a form of added taxation instead of cost reduction and common sense. What comes in the front door by the bucketful goes out the back door by the truckload.

Not worried

David L. Irwin (Your Views, March 12) seems terrified that “there could easily be 5,000 hardcore terrorists in this country, preparing to attack.” According to a study by Alex Nourasteh, an immigration expert at the Cato Institute, between 1975 and 2015 the annual chance of being murdered by someone other than a foreign-born terrorist was 252.9 times greater than the chance of dying in a terrorist attack by a foreign-born terrorist. Also, the study showed the chance of being struck by lightning twice is one in 9 million while the chance of being killed by a refugee in a terrorist attract is one in 3.6 billion. These facts put the threat of terrorism in the proper perspective.

Anarchy?

At Middlebury College in rural Vermont, a group of unruly students prevented a speech by conservative scholar Charles Murray. It’s ironic that some bullies can invoke a twisted interpretation of the First Amendment to prevent another citizen’s legitimate constitutional right of freedom of speech. The civilized way to handle these situations is to first listen to the other person, and then present a rebuttal.

UCLA recently had a similar disruption. But this is not limited to college activities. Public disruption of civil events with destruction of private property, and even desecration of the American flag, were used to express opposition and/or displeasure to the inauguration of President Donald Trump and, previously, to his electoral victory. These acts are unacceptable and often a violation of the law. Are we sliding down a slope leading to anarchy? ystopia is in the air these days. George Orwell’s “1984” is selling like hotcakes — if hotcakes still sold well in this low-carb world. Is the president to blame?

I think historians, no doubt working from their subterranean monasteries, bunkered from the radioactive wasteland above, will note that dystopianism, apocalypticism and other forms of existential paranoia actually predate the Trump presidency. It’s a fever that passes from one subset of the population to another and occasionally blows up into a full-scale pandemic. We all carry the infection in us, sometimes slowsimmering, sometimes in remission and sometimes in extremis.

Hollywood has been running through practice scenarios of doom nonstop from its founding.

Indeed, end-of-the-worldism is, and has long been, a lucrative market niche. To believe that, one need only catch a “food insurance” ad on TV.

Under President Obama, survivalists and other tribes of doomsday preppers were the stuff of late-night comedian mockery and daytime MSNBC journalistic japery. Now they look more like trendsetters.

Shortly before the Trump inauguration, The New Yorker profiled Silicon Valley moguls and other liberal onepercenters stocking up on MREs and ammo. “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system,” an investment banker told The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos. “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Madonna has a new little film out in which she declares we live in a “new age of tyranny” where “all marginalized people are in danger” and “where being uniquely different might truly be considered a crime.”

So an insanely rich, decades-long global media icon is claiming the mantle of the marginalized and oppressed. Where does she find the courage to speak up?

While it’s always easy — and often fun — to point out the irrational paranoia in others, I generally like this tendency in American culture, so long as it’s kept reasonably in check. The Founders were terrified of tyranny. “The Federalist Papers” name-checks one tyrannical cautionary tale after another, from the “tyranny of Macedonian garrisons” to the “elective despotism” of the Venetian republic.

The Framers’ genius lay in their observation that the greatest check on unbridled, or “concentrated,” power was the fear it aroused in competing factions.

In other words, fear gets a bad rap. Franklin D. Roosevelt gets too much praise for his claim that the only thing Americans had to fear was “fear itself.” Fear imparts vital information. I fear snakes and sharks and the possibility of falling out of an airplane. These are all healthy fears. Fear is dangerous when it serves as a substitute for thinking. (I still swim in the ocean and travel on airplanes.) But fear can be useful when it informs our thinking, when it focuses the mind on potential dangers ahead.

Apathy is the practical opposite of fear. Given that tyranny, going by the historical and evolutionary record, is the natural state of humankind, the greatest bulwark against it is a highly cultivated, deeply informed but nonetheless instinctive fear. Edmund Burke never actually uttered the most famous quote attributed to him — “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” — though that is a useful summation of his views. And it’s certainly true.

Apathy is the grease that makes slippery slopes so treacherous.

One of the things that make our politics so ugly isn’t fear, but a lack of sympathetic imagination for the fear of others. Under Obama (and FDR and others), many conservatives articulated thoughtful, informed and rational fears about where his policies might take the country. Other, often louder conservatives offered barbaric yawps based on some of the same fears. The standard liberal response was undifferentiated scorn and mockery. Today (as under Reagan and others), the tables have turned, and the roles have been reversed.

It’s far better to cultivate mutual understanding of each other’s fears than try to smooth away the fear of tyranny with the grease of apathy.

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