One of my most rewarding moments was when I told my grandnephew that when I was young I was scared of something, I forget what it was, that he knew made no sense. A three-year-old doesn’t know how to extend a conversation. So he kept saying, over and over and over,
“You were SCARED, Uncle Bob?”
He couldn’t get over it.
At that age, adults know EVERYTHING. It was the first time in his life that an adult had t0ld this child that he was afraid of something when he was a kid that other people would laugh at.
This gave me special satisfaction because I was the fifth of five children, almost five years younger than the last one. They all told me they were afraid of NOTHING, and I BELIEVED them.
Mr. Rogers sang a little song for his toddler audience, “You won’t go down the drain.” That hole in the bathtub that everything goes down looks little to us, but a small child has no such sense of proportion. He saw everything else go down the drain, so why shoudn’t HE?
I will never cease admiring Mr. Rogers for knowing that, for EMPATHIZING with that.
When I was tiny we had an outhouse. That hole was HUGE to me. And what was UNDER me was horrible and horseflies were down there and also up around me. My family all thought that it was funny how sitting there terrorized me.
Now I live in a whole society that was raised by The Greatest Generation, who had no fear. I am surrounded by every variety of Christian who tells me he knows EXACTLY what the True Faith is. He tells me with a pretence of absolute certainty that he is Saved while others are headed for the Pit. But those “Christians” are far, far more afraid of death than I am.
All my life The Fearless Greatest Generation has warned me not to defy authority because I should be afraid of it.
They tell me they faced death without fear and only they can say what fear really is. But they have lived their lives in terror.
That was OK when the older CHILDREN in my family told me the same thing.
It is NOT OK when adults tell me the same crap today.
#1 by Alan B. on 10/30/2006 - 2:35 pm
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I read an article that explained how public education would stiffel a childs immagination and creativity by the time they reached the Junior High. I was reminded of this after reading Bob’s piece about fear and how children see things. Yound children view the world as a great unknow, they seek answers to mysterys, yet they do not grasp the world around them, so how do adults come away not fearing anything today, how did they lose that desire to seek out and answer lifes mysterys.
By adulthood we may assume we know everything yet we tend to shy away from rocking the boat in todays society. To say we fear nothing is just an exaple of how we hide our fear from others. The child is not conditioned to respect authority and the comformist rules of modern society, the adult throught conditioning has learned to just accept things as they are. In reality they are more afraid than the child.
#2 by Pain on 10/30/2006 - 3:15 pm
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“He tells me with a pretence of absolute certainty that he is Saved while others are headed for the Pit.”
Which is why he gave up the fight so easily. If you really believe you are going to Heaven no matter what you do, if you really believe the Lord is coming back in two years to fix everything and set up the thousand-year reign, if you really believe that nothing in this life matters, because it is so easy to get to Heaven — then it’s alright to let Evil triumph and people suffer. To do the right thing and resist Evil would be to show a lack of faith!
Thus they have concocted an excuse for COWARDICE, which is naturally why they are obsessed with fear they claim they don’t have. Then they tell you that their cowardice comes from God, in other words if you are fighting Evil, you are fighting God.
I have heard this excuse my whole life. As a kid if I told an adult, hey the illegals aliens are burglarizing people’s homes, raping, and they are being given your jobs. The adult would say, “I know, but the Lord is coming back.” Another example: nobody wants Walmart in their town, it destroys the local downtown and raises taxes. A man comes around with a petition to keep Walmart out. He arrives at someone’s house who admits that Walmart is a problem, but refuses to sign the petition and he makes fun of the guy carrying it around. He says, “It’s easy to understand how these people think keeping Walmart out or saving the environment is so important. They don’t believe in Heaven. They think the world is all there is. I am going to be in Heaven in a few years, so why should I care what happens down here?”
It never occurs to these would-be “Christians” that those who do not resist Evil are going to That Other Place.
#3 by Mark on 10/30/2006 - 10:39 pm
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Peter, an excellent posting!
#4 by Elizabeth on 11/01/2006 - 1:00 am
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I find this obsession with the “End Times,” the “Rapture,” the “Second Coming,” and such to
be exasperating or pathetic, depending upon my mood at the time. I take the “no one knows
the day or the hour” to mean DON’T GET OBSESSED WITH IT!
I’m a believer in free will and that means that I don’t take my eventual fate for granted.
I pray, but I also do what I can to improve things as they are, to make the world a better
place, whether it’s being nice to one person, participating in a group activity, or
using my God-given talents.
#5 by Elizabeth on 11/01/2006 - 1:07 am
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I’m in graduate school in my forties, so I’ve been seeing a lot of the helicopter-parented
for the last few years. (“Helicopter parents” is a name for the type of parenting that’s
so prevalent, especially in the suburbs, in which the parents chronically over-schedule
their children, do their best to insulate them from low self-esteem and stay _very_ involved
in their kids’ lives from infancy to adulthood.)
These kids usually don’t know how to respond to the unpredictable. I’ve seen this in
action: they’ll stand around a laser printer in the library while the “attention
needed” message is blinking — and the kid at the desk who’s paid to provide assistance,
frantically looks at his computer screen trying to figure out what’s wrong with the printer.
(He won’t get up and punch the buttons or anything like that.) If I hadn’t gone to another
area with a working printer, I would have gotten on my cell phone and called the computer
division’s central office — after I worked on the printer.