March 1
Being afraid is a bad experience. I’m not talking about nervousness, worry, or mild anxiety; I’m talking about real fear. The kind that shuts down your ability to think clearly. The kind that leads people to do things that, later, even they themselves can’t fathom. And more often than not, they feel regret. Fear leads to sadness.
That’s been the case countless times, both major historical events and individual, private scenes that have been long since forgotten. It’s the sadness that lingers. It lingers today in New England. It’s the anniversary of the beginning of the Salem Witch Trials, over 3 centuries ago. A population of isolated, poorly educated colonists in a strange country on a strange continent got scared. They were afraid because of superstition, and turned to unfounded beliefs and things people told them that they didn’t check out for themselves. The frightened people killed some other frightened people. There’s no way to remember that kind of episode except with sadness.
A century and a half before that, in France, March 1 marked the murder of hundreds of people because other people were afraid. It’s not entirely clear what they were afraid of, but the people they killed expressed beliefs about something nobody checked out for themselves. The killers were afraid of those beliefs, so to eradicate them, they had to eliminate the believers. Because you can’t see a belief. It can’t hurt you. It’s just in your mind — or, worse, in somebody else’s mind. So you have to eliminate that mind. Except…now that belief is in your mind too. Maybe you don’t think you “believe” it. But you know about it, so it still exists.
Regardless of whether the murderers felt safer, what they started — the Massacre of Vassy —turned into what we now call the French Wars of Religion. More than thirty years of conflict, and probably three million people dead. All because of fear. And what is it since but sadness.
In the epic novel Dune there is a litany recited by a group of…well, it’s hard to explain, but it’s a group of people. This is what they say:
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Those are fictional characters, obviously, and the words are Frank Herbert’s, the author. But they ring true outside the novel too. When the Soviet Union was expanding the old Russian Empire just when World War II was being won, Poland was in the crosshairs. Resistance movements sprang up out of the resistance groups formed to combat the Nazis during the war. They were never well coordinated, and the groups were isolated and small. The Russian NKVD hunted them down and killed every last one. It was all done out of fear. The Russians were afraid that the resistance could spread, and stop the expansion of their empire. The resistance fighters are remembered on this very day. They were known as cursed soldiers or doomed soldiers. Today in Poland it is National Cursed Soldiers Remembrance Day. It’s a sad day, started by fear.
Today is a memorial day in the Marshall Islands, too; it’s Remembrance Day. What they’re remembering is clearer in the formal title of the day: Nuclear Victims’ Day and Nuclear Survivors’ Day. People remember that the US dropped nuclear weapons on Japan, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What isn’t as well remembered is that the US dropped nuclear weapons on the Marshall Islands, too. Only in the Marshall Islands, they were called “tests.” People lived there, just like they lived in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The US made some effort to evacuate people from their homes before they were summarily obliterated, but the tests didn’t turn out quite as expected. Some bombs were much more violent than predicted, while others were less. One, in particular, was called Castle Bravo. It was detonated on March 1, 1954, and produced vastly more radiation than anybody predicted. People evacuated to “safe” locations on surrounding islands were irradiated, with at least one dying immediately and the rest suffering health problems for the rest of their foreshortened lives. And why were nuclear weapons being tested? The same reason they were created in the first place, and the same reason they were dropped on civilian populations: fear. The lasting effect? Sadness.
It’s Self-injury Awareness Day today too. It’s a day to support openness about personal self-harm, to raise awareness, and educate the medical field and you and me about the issue. Self-harm isn’t directly based on fear (as far as I know), but I think it can lead to fear. Fear among others; the loved ones and families of people afflicted with this, wherever it comes from. If you suffer from self-harm, from active behavior to just urges, there is help available. But you have to be open enough to seek it. It’s nothing to be ashamed of; there are millions of people in the same situation. It’s not a disability, either.
But speaking of disabilities, that can be a source of fear as well. Fear among the able-bodied and able-minded that they could come to share a disability. And fear among the disabled that their particular disability will be the only thing about them that people can see. Their abilities, not to mention talents and expertise, might be occluded. Maybe by the fear felt by the abled. Because when you experience fear, you can’t think straight until it passes. Fear really is a mind-killer.
It’s not just individuals that experience fear; it seems that organizations can be collectively afraid. Governments fear things. Maybe it’s just the individuals highly placed in a government that feel the fear, but the irrationality and ill-considered behavior go beyond just those few. This is the anniversary of the day in 1990 that a game company was raided by the Secret Service. Steve Jackson Games is a small company that creates games. Not computer games; these are board games, role-playing games, card games, and things like that. In 1990 they were working on a game (again, not a computer game) about computer hacking. The Secret Service raided the place and seized computers and other materials because they were afraid that anyone who played the game (which was called GURPS Cyberpunk) would learn how to commit computer crimes in real life. GURPS Cyberpunk, like all Steve Jackson games, was played entirely on paper. Steve Jackson Games sued and won, and most of the seized materials were returned. Except for what had been destroyed, deleted, or otherwise ruined. There was a lot ruined; supposed “evidence” is not treated gently. Everyone whose work was affected was, I would guess, angry at first, and then saddened.
But March 1 offers at least one alternative to the fear and sadness that seem so endemic to the human condition. All you have to do is travel to Iceland, where today is Beer Day. In Iceland, you see, beer was prohibited for 74 years, from 1915 to March 1, 1989. They had originally banned all alcohol, but relented first on wine (because Spain wouldn’t buy Icelandic fish unless they could sell their wine there), then on spirits. But the prohibition on beer remained, supposedly because it was the cheapest alcoholic drink. Beer Day is a pretty popular holiday in Iceland, and recently it even spread to the US, where today is called Icelandic Beer Day. Although I don’t think you’re limited to just Icelandic beer.
