Good essay by Ira Chernus over on TomDispatch. It’s about fear, and the recent attempts by anti-Bush forces to use the fear frame — "he’s not keeping us safe" — to topple the administration. It’s an effective short-term tactic, he says, but perhaps a bad long-term strategy.
We’ll never be safe if we make safety our ultimate goal. We’ll be safe only if we let safety be a by-product of a society working together to improve life for everyone.
The best way to be secure is to imagine a genuine politics of hope. Imagine. Unfortunately, when John Lennon said, "It’s easy if you try," he was quite wrong. After six decades of our national insecurity state, it’s incredibly hard. But it’s an effort that anti-Bush forces ought to make. The alternative is, however inadvertently, to reinforce the politics of fear that Bush and his kind thrive on. The belief that danger is everywhere — that we must have leaders whose great task is to keep us safe — is the one great danger we really do need to protect ourselves against.
The implications for how greens approach global warming are, I trust, obvious.
