Why You Must Learn to Love ‘Fear’

Paranoia is a good character trait if they really are trying to get you.

Inquiring minds are reading a fabulous post on American Thinker entitled, “The Only Thing That Will Save Us Now Is Fear Itself“. In it, Herbert E. Meyer does a great job of explaining just where we are:

I hate to say this, but right now the only thing that can save our country is — fear itself. Our government is bankrupt, its deficit is insurmountable, and at both the federal and state levels, we’ve run up more debt than can possibly be repaid. This isn’t a political thing; it’s a numbers thing. Either everything I’ve ever learned about math and economics is wrong, or we’re on the verge of going down. The only possible way to come through safely — and even so, the odds are against us — will be to frighten ourselves so badly that we’ll be willing to do things that in normal times we simply could not imagine doing.

So if we are taking a plane to Hawaii (think “The High and The Mighty”) and our aircraft has a fuel leak. The pilot announces to lighten the plane immediately to so we can make it but…

Now imagine that just as we and the other passengers are stripping off and handing everything to the crew members manning the aft hatch, there’s a second announcement from the flight deck: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the co-pilot. I’ve done my own calculations, and I don’t think the fuel leak is all that serious. If we just lighten the load a bit, and gain some altitude, we’ll have no trouble making a safe and on-time landing.”

What? How is it possible that the pilot and co-pilot can reach such different conclusions with the same data? And whom are we passengers supposed to believe? My guess is that most of us will choose to believe the co-pilot and go back to whatever we were doing — reading, snoozing, watching a movie — when the pilot scared us half to death. We won’t want to even consider the possibility that the pilot is correct and that the co-pilot is wrong, or perhaps even lying to us.

And this is the political jam we’re in. It’s obvious to anyone who’s looked honestly at the numbers that we’re about to go down into a sea of red ink. You don’t need a Nobel Prize in economics to understand this. All you need is a simple, back-of-the-envelope calculation to see that the federal government is hemorrhaging money so fast our economy must inevitably seize up, which will crash the dollar overseas and turn a national disaster into a global catastrophe. The financial situation is even worse in states like California and New York.

This is exactly our nation’s problem in a nutshell. And not only economically, either. We, as a nation, have become so ‘intellectual’ that we have cut our feelings off. Those ‘feelings’ that have been put into us to save us from dangerous situations.

This article is a “must read”. Please, click on the above link to read it in its entirety.