Re: 'Are we living in a culture of fear?' [Village News, Letter, 3/4/21]

Dear Ms. Reeder,

I read your editorial of March 4, but did not respond as you might have wished. I “fear” that you have become ensnared in an increasingly small information trap.

You seem to find great credibility in the words of self-proclaimed experts who enjoy the maverick attention they garner from using their professional titles to disseminate opinions that set them apart from their more respected professional colleagues. This perspective comes from limiting your information sources chiefly to those that fit your own existing biases and desires with the occasional outside excursion just to confirm how crazy everyone else is.

I agree that there is a “culture of fear,” one that has been created for you and to which you have succumbed. Those who have suffered most in this pandemic are the poor and the “essential workers” who have been less able to protect themselves from this virus while the rest of us whine about mask wearing and not going to indoor restaurants.

Right wing politics focuses on “the economy” as a whole over the welfare of individuals. It is this political force that is behind the disinformation you are spreading about masks and vaccines. In short, it needs you to believe we must maintain business as usual and not to take this pandemic seriously.

If a few hundred thousand people, or a few million people die and/or are disabled for the rest of their lives in the process, that’s just collateral damage to the economy.

And as for the culture of fear, far right politics encourage us to fear losing our jobs to immigrants, violence by strangers, democrats taking our guns, strangers kidnaping our children, being forced to have an abortion, having to provide service to gay people, not being allowed to practice fundamentalist Christianity, having our taxes used to help people, paying our fair share in taxes, receiving the social benefits that first world nations around the world enjoy and Americans do not, poor people voting in proportion to their numbers, people of color voting in proportion to their numbers and not being seen as exceptional and deserving of most of the world’s bounty, etc.

The right wing philosophy that engulfs you tells us that there is not enough to go around for everyone if everyone gets a fair shot. So we need to make sure we keep what we have, what we believe we earned and deserve, by making sure that the “undeserving,” the “lazy,” the “foreigners” don’t take it from us. That’s what the fear is for.

It’s about the economy, the stock market and keeping the bulk of the wealth exactly where it is, in the hands of the very few.

Cynthia Young