Anxiety and Fear

There is a powerful emotion in all creatures and it's called fear.  It is a survival instinct and has probably been the single greatest reason any species has been able to survive and reproduce.  The urge to reproduce is another powerful drive but I will save that one for a future post.  Fear can keep an animal from approaching danger.  It can keep that creature on high alert when danger is imminent.  It can cause a flight/fight reaction when danger is present, allowing a creature to deal with or escape the danger.  It serves a vital purpose in the world and yet we humans attempt to eliminate it from our lives.  Is that wise?

We are made miserable by fear.  It creates a pervasive dread that hangs over us like a cloud.  It can be a suffocating fog that clouds our judgement and paralyzes us into immobility.  It can destroy our ability to function effectively in the world.  It would seem that eliminating it from our lives would be desirable but what would be the unintended consequences of such an elimination?

Fear is a powerful motivator... perhaps the most powerful.  It compels us to act when nothing else will.  It drives us (through our desire to escape it) to advance, grow, develop, evolve and improve our surroundings and make our lives better.  Losing fear from our psyche will cause all those positive impulses and drives to slow or stop.  It will stagnate and eventually reverse our development as a species.  We will begin a process of devolution and will fall victim to some predation or, even, die off from apathy or entropy.

Manage fear, certainly.  Eliminate it?  Never.  Not if we wish to survive.

I always think of "Paddle To The Sea" when I do this.

It was a children's book I read when I was about 10 years old.  A man carves a wooden canoe with an Indian sitting in it.  He pours a molten lead keel into a slot carved on the bottom so the canoe will float upright then he sets it in a small creek in Canada.  He gave the little carved warrior the Indian name Paddle To The Sea.  The story follows Paddle To The Sea's journey from brook to stream to river to lake, over a dam, through a city with it's pollution and, finally, to the sea.  He washes up on a far away beach and lies among the driftwood for a long time but is found by a man who repaints his faded colors and sets him afloat once again.

I always think of that story when I toss one of these messengers into the water.

 

 

Every once in a great while someone finds one of them and sends me an email.  Maybe people have found my earliest messages but they would have sent letters to an address where I no longer live.  I'll never know.

 



Dawsonville is home to a "hot" relic of the Cold War.

Georgia's Area 51

This link takes you to a great story of the history of AFP No. 67 in Dawsonville, Georgia.

 

https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5803597644357686680#allposts

 

The Social Hammock

Obamacare and the convoluted gymnastic twisting to spin it.

As Obamacare fails to gain popularity people who support it are forced into ever more convoluted defenses of it.  One popular spin is that the increases and changes are the fault of the insurance companies.  This is a false front for an extortion ring.  The rules and policies that the insurance companies have to follow are spelled out to the tiniest detail by the federal government... right down to how much profit they are allowed to make.  It just allows the federals to pull the strings but stand behind the screen and blame the insurance providers.

My response to a response...

I made a comment on CNN's website about the VA failing to provide care for veterans and how I see that as a vision of things to come under Obamacare.  A response came back telling me I was a Tea Party ignoramus because the VA is a PROVIDER and Obamacare is an INSURANCE PLAN.

I felt the distinction was negligible.  If you cut off my finger with poultry shears or a hedge clipper really makes no fundamental difference.  I responded to his response and it disappeared the next day.  I posted the following response this morning and will preserve it here so I can keep posting it every time CNN sees fit to delete my dissent:

"The plan you have under Obamacare is only as good as the actual care you can get.  You can have total, comprehensive coverage of every possible condition and have it at no cost but, if your provider can't actually give you the care your plan authorizes then it is a worthless plan.  A waiting room full of people with Obamacare Gold Plans, all being told they can't get the care they signed up for...  "But I have it covered under my Gold Plan doctor!"  "Yeah.  You and everyone else here.  We still only have the one dialysis machine so go sit down and wait your turn.  Oh!  And try not to die before we can get to you.."  That is what makes the VA failure and Obamacare THE SAME THING you socialist, collectivist, parasitic ignoramus."

You judge a country by how well most people are doing, not by how well the poorest are doing (or the richest for that matter). There will always be those that find a way to succeed and, through that success, become the most well-off.  You will always have poor people as well.  In EVERY society, throughout ALL of civilization's history, there have been poor people.  Efforts to end poverty merely drag everyone down to a common low level.  Never has it raised everyone to a common high level.  Societies have battled poverty in every conceivable way and poured the wealth of their treasuries into the problem... all to no avail.  If the smartest people on the planet have debated and discussed and implemented plan after plan after plan and poverty refuses to go away... perhaps we must admit that it never will.  Just like avarice and anger and fear will never (and should never) be purged from society, we should accept that some will always be poor and some will always be rich.  Watch the rich and ensure they remain within the law .  Watch the poor and offer reasonable aid to those who seek help in rising from poverty.  In either case, if you find fraud and abuse... punish it.  If you make all your rules based on the condition of the poor you will siphon off the assets of those better off and add them to the roles of the poor. If you make no rules to restrain the rich they will become despotic.  It snowballs and compounds to the point of system failure.  I think many people actively seek that without seeing how the resulting havoc will destroy more lives.  

I have a new Grand Daughter named Peyton.  She has me firmly by the heart.  Nothing poignant or spirited to say.  I just have a wonderful grandchild.