First of all, thank you for providing this forum, Wendy. If we cannot build bridges here at TPM, then the country truly is doomed, because there is much less of a divide here.

1) What are your fears for yourself?

Few. I am in good shape unless the whole country disintegrates.

2) What are your fears for your parents/ /children /extended family?

Again, few. My kids are grown, and as long as we have resources, they will not starve or have nowhere to live.

3) What are your fears for your ethnic, religious or socio/economic group?

ethnic - none
religious - I am afraid that my continued disappointment in my fellow Christians will ultimately eat away at my faith...
socio/economic - Although technically I fall into the upper class, I self-identify with the middle class, and fear that it is going away. And since I believe the country needs a strong middle class to survive, my fears here are mostly for the health of the country.

4) What are your fears for the country as a whole?

That we will cease moving forward, and instead chose the path that leads back to where we have been. This area is where I find most of our problems around here...and where the bridges need to be built. I see only 2 viable paths. Not because I am not "open" to more paths, but because I have been unable to see how they ultimately lead back to anywhere other than the one I don't want to take.

That our country has lost its moral compass, and has become so deeply divided that we never be able to put it back together again.

5) What are your fears for the world?

That we have taken a break from the hostilities of the Crusades, and they are now heating back up...that ultimately we will destroy the world because of the clash of cultures.

That even if we can somehow avoid the clash of cultures, the shortage of oil or water will cause the same destruction.

As the discussion advances, I may have more.

Side note: I have heard it said that anger is nothing more than a reaction to fear...something to consider.

1. I am afraid of dying and I am afraid of living.

2. I am afraid that my children will find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. I have a 34 year old daughter who informed me that she wishes to 'get on with her life' because she figures she has only about 60 years left.

3. I am a fat old white man. I fear that God, if there is a God, will be mighty angry for what our generation wrought.

4. I fear that my country will continue to be THE great imperial power for the next full century. And China will eventually surpass us and continue to steal whatever world resources are available.

5. We need new clean tube socks. Everybody in the entire world needs tube socks. And the world must be devoided of Lucy re-runs.

the end

Er....can I have some of your money? ;-)

C'Ville:
I have more serious responses to what you wrote, but in response to your relative fear of forgetting things, etc. it might amuse you, on a Saturday night or Sunday morning, to read this:
http://wendystaebler.posterous.com/the-marshall-plan

Between fear and rage, rage is a much more modest emotion, and that's why rutabagas don't see no future nor feel no fear!

The blogosphere is overloaded with fearful or pollyanna prognosticators, and none of them can foresee fuck all. Some idiots predicted Obama would inaugurate a New Age of Wonderfulness, while other idiots predict he will socialize their underpants and sell their children to UBL.

Meanwhile the Ragin' Rutabaga (TM) merely observed Obama endorsing FTA-Peru in October 2007 (while 4,000,000 Peruvian workers and farmers were out on general strike against it) and raged.

"The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction!"

Ruta: I agree with you --"Between fear and rage, rage is a much more modest emotion..."

LOL! That's great!

Dang- my biggest fear - a TPM double post! Now I look like a flipping fool in front of everyone here! Just because I let spoon I was stirring my tea with drop on my keyboard while I was thinking of a clever and poignant list of my fears. Dang and double dang.

Oh its okay, I have been looking like a fool for some time now.

You get used to it. ha

LOL!

1) What are your fears for yourself?

I fear that I will chicken out because of a desire to keep the peace with friends. I fear that I will fail in the service of a good idea because I clothe it in lousy language and feeble argument. I fear "goblins and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night"--which I define as stuff I don't know...my own ignorance. I also fear my obsessive-compulsive efforts to know everything...why in the world would I ever need about 5000 bookmarks?

2) What are your fears for your parents/ /children /extended family?

I suppose I have a few, but I don't think of them often... My extended family is dispersed, and I often wish that wasn't true... (see #4)

3) What are your fears for your ethnic, religious or socio/economic group?

I'm members of privileged minorities in all of these areas, so I don't have much reason to fear for them. I am more often angry at them for abusing the privileges they have. For example, my grandparents were Swedish immigrants, my generation has to a large extent left the working class and in the process has stopped respecting the blue collar world that my grandfathers (a tailor, a grain elevator foreman) and grandmothers (maids, cooks) inhabited.

4) What are your fears for the country as a whole?

I fear the various groups in the country are deliberately isolating themselves from one another. The substance of this is dispersion into low density-highly mobile communities with homogeneous populations -- "relovilles" as one of my favorite books has it. We are unwilling to make capital sacrifices for communities where we expect to live only a short time and we if we can avoid "the other" we don't have to know who they are, what they contribute, or what they need from us. The end result is a lot of boredom and addiction to sensationalism as a remedy, and minimal civic engagement.

5) What are your fears for the world?

The wrong kind of globalism. Globalism of "stuff," which is energy inefficient and tends to drive wages of those who make "stuff" down. I'm very happy with globalism of ideas, and this age is marvelous for that. I'd like more globalism of people--not forced migrations but free migrations. I suppose we'll have to wait until life is discovered on other planets before we have global citizenship and free migration similar to the European Union scheme, but on a global scale.

WW, this is great. I know I was a little flippant above but after thinking about my fears all evening and this morning I realized something - my fears connected to your list are basically all about me not getting mine and when I look at that thought it is so unsustainable I have to laugh. And that thought process has given me a little (so very little) understanding or compassion for the right wing nutters. Thank you for helping me to get to here.

Swaying rope bridges= taking outward bound action to banish fear? Or an exercise in reinforcing fear? (not crazy about heights myself, or swaying bridges. Photo selected for imagery of start chasm to be crossed and to work the cat's cradle/knot theme to death. -;)

1) What are your fears for yourself?
My deepest personal fear is that I will have to bear cognitive witness to my own personal decline as I age.

2) What are your fears for your parents/ /children /extended family?
My deepest fear is for my grandchildren who may have to witness our species’ spiral into extinction.

3) What are your fears for your ethnic, religious or socio/economic group?
In the age of globalization, my biggest fear is that the slicing and dicing of our species into groups based on ethnicity, religious upbringing and economic status will continue. We are in an age of deepening divisions throughout the world and my fear is that it will continue. It’s not just the visuals of Katrina, it’s also the visuals of a $8000 shower curtain or the richness of papal adornments clashing with the sorrow of a molested child. I am bearing witness to tragedy.

4) What are your fears for the country as a whole?
I view America as in decline with our self-anointed leaders congratulating themselves as they move more into roles as world leaders--leaving anyone “lesser” behind. The “prosperity doctrine” emphasizes that God smiles in this world upon those who serve him--merely reinforcing the Social Darwinism that has overtaken those who manage to cling to inherited wealth or who succeed in today’s world where economic status defines the ‘best” of humans. Enron has become our norm in the business world; and hard-nosed and rigid preachers are our norm in the religious world; in the political world, the spin and message discipline is more important than the common good. Our greatest hope is in the under-30 crowd.

5) What are your fears for the world?
I don’t actually fear for the world--Earth will survive. Right now, though, I believe that the trajectory of the human species is toward extinction.

I was going to quip yesterday that my fears might take a 4MG flashdrive to contain, but they are mostly concerning some joint problems I have, so don't qualify for group solutions.
As for the others, I gurgle all over the boards about them, but in a this-is-horrid, let's-get-it-stopped or we-need-this-alternative stuff.
(But yes, I fear for my grandchildren's futures, and others' as well.)

Just now I'm fired with righteous rage, and don't want to stop to enummerate the fears.
I'd rather be pissed, and write it out.

And since Stiili is willing to give me some pots of money, it sort of takes care of some of the personal/family ones, anyway.

Thanks, Stilli! ;-)

Well...ya can't blame a girl for tryin'!

And it's:
The Reverend Wendy Davis
Box 666
Bumfrick, ID 666661

LOL!

Still:

1) Personal and Family. I am glad you feel relatively secure, personally and for your family.

I learned, the hard way, however,that economic catastrophe is rarely a singular event but, rather, is a series of events that may occur concurrently or sequentially, without time out to regroup, and which may be accompanied by "tipping point" events which, even in the literal sense, may converge into a perfect storm. So I hope, for your sakes, that you do have a backup plan should you encounter a covergance of unforeseen economic catastrophe/natural disaster.... you do live in troubled times in earthquake country, after all.

I didn't have such a plan, simply because I could not envision a convergence of events that would cause the level of personal loss I sustained. So do feel free to learn from my experience, some of which I could have prevented -- if I had been less optimistic and lessnaive. Instead, I had too much faith in the advice of market financial advisors (their fault) + too much money invested in real estate (my fault) + lived in ground zero of a major hurricane that devastated that real estate (no fault, except maybe the gods') + a year and a half of double living expenses without any insurance payout whatsoever (corporate fraud and malfeasance) + a marital meltdown (our fault) ..... you get the picture. No one counts on that many factors happening at once, or even serially.

3) Class. It's been a long time since class was defined as character, or even as relative levels of education, etc.; now it's defined, instead, by balance sheets in terms of dollars and cents. Therefore, I finally see that traditional class designations have become irrelevant. There is the uber 1-2% in the "upper" monied class and then there is everyone else, who differ one from another only in relative degrees of perceived safety and/or desperation.

This realization is quite freeing in a way, even though it took a prolonged six year free-fall for me to grasp it. The bad news is that there are now only two classes -- the robber barons and the rest of us. The good news is that we're out of the boxes that socio/economic designations used to represent.

The result? Most of us can now consider ourselves to effectively class-less, even class-free (maybe in more ways than we think, eh? -;)

I see a danger to all of us, though, not only from power wielded by the 1-2%, but also from the apparent blindness/paralysis of the traditional middle class:

There is a faction within the remnants of those who perceive themselves to be traditional middle class that has a lot to answer for in terms of inaction -- those who support the robber barons and look down on, separate themselves from, an identification with those with less than they have. These people are a danger to themselves and others, in failing to perceive how slippery the slope and how precarious their safety is, pending future events.

So, what actions can one take, what actions can we take, to impress upon the ostriches that their safety is illusory, to one degree or another? Because only when they see that will they be motivated to see themselves as "one of" rather than "separate from."

Religion: what can we do to counteract the rise of fundamentalism in every religion? Those of us who are atheist/agnostic have no persuasive clout whatsoever with fundamentalists, so the burden of that responsibility must fall to those who have a more enlightened, tolerant faith. What can you do, as a person of faith, to make a difference in this regard?

Thank you for that link, DD. Our endless warmongering and economic ostrichism both represent "deja vu" all over again.

Now, about tube socks as the answer to everything; s'plain please?

Ha! Fishy!

I'm just doin a blog later on the subject of tube sox.

I misplaced my response to you, Obey, which is below.

Thanks, ClearThinker -- if you meant that you especially liked the title but thought the topic worthwhile, too.
If that is the case, what part do you think fear plays in our political paralysis?
If, on the other hand, the title was the only thing you liked, how might I have framed this blog differently, in your opinion, to increase its usefulness?

AMike --
To question #4, you said:
"....various groups in the country are deliberately isolating themselves from one another. The substance of this is dispersion into low density-highly mobile communities with homogeneous populations -- "relovilles" as one of my favorite books has it. We are unwilling to make capital sacrifices for communities where we expect to live only a short time and we if we can avoid "the other" we don't have to know who they are, what they contribute, or what they need from us. The end result is a lot of boredom and addiction to sensationalism as a remedy, and minimal civic engagement....."

I agree, absolutely. This inherent planning flaw will now be exacerbated by all the foreclosures that result from people being laid off, and by the rising cost of gasoline with few suburbs connected to urban centers by public transportation.
Question: from an urban planning point of view, what's the long-term solution? Is it to let the suburbs die as a bad idea? Or to target some of them that are the furthest outliers from a population hub for loss and demolition? Or to build public transport connectors so that people can still live in them without being bankrupted by transportation costs?

To question #5 you said:
"The wrong kind of globalism. Globalism of "stuff"....... I'd like more globalism of people--not forced migrations but free migrations....."
What can we do, as American citizens, to stop the war against immigration, as well as soften the impediments to emigration?

BlueSplashy -- if you have achieved more sympathy for the nutters, please retrace your thought process so that others of us may find similar compassion or understanding of them. Really.

Wendy, you said:

"Just now I'm fired with righteous rage, and don't want to stop to enummerate the fears. I'd rather be pissed, and write it out....."

Rage is a great energizer, my friend, as I know from personal experience. Whatever it takes to keep your remarkable research/analysis going works well for all of us.

Thanks for the song.

;-)

It is an amazing song, ennit? To get down so low, and then come back up with such intention?

It's all about the basic fear of not getting mine - my love, my money, my power, my place - that I "deserve". Or, losing my love, my money, my power, my place (in my society or tribe). And that is so silly when I look it in the face, just stare right at it and think about the energy I could expend on that fear. Not worth it mainly because I have enough - more then enough when I think about people that have less. But what I connected to and recognized was that FEAR and it made me think about what the tea partiers are yelling about. Behind that anger is the same FEAR I had (and will have again I'm sure). I can relate to that. It is the first of a tiny little crack of compassion I have ever felt for those nutcakes but it is a start. Still think they are dead wrong and stupid and all that but I never thought I would begin to even slightly understand them and thinking about your questions got me there. Thank you
PS. I don't know if I am yet willing to get close enough to one to talk to them - might get cooties!