Walls built of fear around bodies and minds

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Fear drives people to wall themselves off from reality inside their carefully-constructed ideals.
I think of a middle-aged white businessman from Michigan with whom I’ve debated the pandemic for many months. A staunch libertarian, he considers compulsory public health precautions as tantamount to slavery. They deny, he says, “my feelings, my rights, my personal body”.

Regular exposure to different points of view could complicate such diehard convictions. But our fractured media have deepened the existing fissures of American society.

Walls at home and on the road, shielding the body from exposure and the mind from uncomfortable ideas: these interlocking divides make it more difficult to take unfamiliar people and perspectives seriously; harder to acknowledge the needs of strangers, to trust their motives and empathize with their struggles. In an atomized society, others become phantoms all too easily, grist for the mill of resentment and mistrust.

There’s a deep and pernicious history at work here. Longstanding patterns of neighborhood racial segregation have inflamed the prejudice against outgroups, bolstering stereotypes, as the political scientist Ryan Enos and others have shown. When such divisions are reproduced at an everyday scale, the gulf between self and other widens even further, and everyone becomes a potential outsider.
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2022 ... -polarized

Vote out candidates who promote fear to get elected. Resist peacefully and speak out: write to newspapers and media outlets.

CDFingers
Crazy cat peekin' through a lace bandana
like a one-eyed Cheshire, like a diamond-eyed Jack

Re: Walls built of fear around bodies and minds

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Good article CD. As I sit in my house thinking about it. I have the standard new subdivision home with the "privacy" fence of wood six feet tall blocking my view of the neighbors yard. The house I grew up in and my parents lived in for the greater part of their lives didn't have that. As a military brat we lived in base housing where there was no or very few fences. The fences that were there were to keep the dogs in the yard and were goat wire. The house we owned were faced but it was four foot chain link. The kids would play and the adults would stand at the fence and talk. You knew your neighbors and their children. You also helped each other when needed. Now our houses are the guarded fortress with security light on all night and alarm systems. We barely know our neighbors and we use services to fix issues at the house. some even use lawn services to maintain the yard. We don't really have neighborhoods any more. We are the isolated islands of a fortress subdivision.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: Walls built of fear around bodies and minds

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There is logical fear and illogical fear, the pandemic isn't permanent. People who were already paranoid, became a little more so during the pandemic. We've become a very litigious society, fences also become a legal requirement if you have a swimming pool, because a pool is an enticement for children and you're liable. If you have guard dogs, you have to enclose them because of liability and general leash laws.

We also didn't lock our houses or cars when I was growing up in a rural area, but crime spread from cities to suburbs and farther. And all the middle class businesses that have started up to protect the wealthy in their walled enclaves. And the billionaires and celebrities who have their security details, but want more and more gun control.

Nostalgia makes the good old days seem good, but there was more domestic abuse, more high school drop outs, terrible shame and guilt over out of wedlock births and abortion was illegal. Illegal drugs are much more rampant, because the wealthy and the middle class are addicted to them. The good old days weren't all that good.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Walls built of fear around bodies and minds

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That people can make a walled garden of their own minds and that it is quite dangerous, is the point of the article.

How to draw people out? Well, squelch the pandemic with vaccines and boosters, masks and distancing, and using printed Republican talking points to line the parrot cage with.

CDFingers
Crazy cat peekin' through a lace bandana
like a one-eyed Cheshire, like a diamond-eyed Jack

Re: Walls built of fear around bodies and minds

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sikacz wrote: Tue Jan 18, 2022 11:17 am I’m in a pessimistic mood, I don’t think there’s away to draw people out. People are too invested in their positions. Doesn’t matter what you say or what evidence is given, minds will not be changed.
And now you understand why the trebuchet does exist. If you can't draw them out, you share your boulder collection with them. I think the fearful fear merely their equality of validity with "the other," bless their hearts.

CDFingers
Crazy cat peekin' through a lace bandana
like a one-eyed Cheshire, like a diamond-eyed Jack

Re: Walls built of fear around bodies and minds

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CDFingers wrote: Thu Jan 20, 2022 9:11 pm Now that I'm a totally old fart, I think I'm going to make a working trebuchet, but small. Maybe to throw cats onto the bed.

CDFingers
Is that to be a conceal carry trebuchet and do you have a permit for it? Is Does it have serial number and is it on the Roster?
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: Walls built of fear around bodies and minds

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TrueTexan wrote: Tue Jan 18, 2022 10:23 am Good article CD. As I sit in my house thinking about it. I have the standard new subdivision home with the "privacy" fence of wood six feet tall blocking my view of the neighbors yard. The house I grew up in and my parents lived in for the greater part of their lives didn't have that. As a military brat we lived in base housing where there was no or very few fences. The fences that were there were to keep the dogs in the yard and were goat wire. The house we owned were faced but it was four foot chain link. The kids would play and the adults would stand at the fence and talk. You knew your neighbors and their children. You also helped each other when needed. Now our houses are the guarded fortress with security light on all night and alarm systems. We barely know our neighbors and we use services to fix issues at the house. some even use lawn services to maintain the yard. We don't really have neighborhoods any more. We are the isolated islands of a fortress subdivision.
That is poetic, insightful, and very telling about the state of contemporary America. Good post.

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