In 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt spoke to a nation newly at war, a nation that had survived a decade of deprivation and would shortly be sacrificing more. He said that the only thing to be feared was fear itself. Times have changed.
At the checkout at Target the other day I did not have enough cash to pay for the item I wanted, but I needed eight quarters in change. The cashier told me that the cash drawer would not open for a credit card purchase, so I grabbed a pack of chewing gum simply to create a cash sale. Not wanting the gum, I turned to the next customer in line saying, “Here, have some gum.” This was met with a look of horror. Scarcely had I put the gum in her hand then she lunged to put it in my shopping bag, saying, “No! I don’t want this! Take it!”
Last week, I was on my bicycle after dark. I had a neighbor’s mail that had been wrongly delivered to me. Seeing the neighbor arriving home, I rode up to deliver the mail as she got out of her car. I spoke before she saw me and she almost froze. Turning around, she relaxed and said, “Oh, it’s you!”
As a man walking down the street, I expect that any woman approaching will look determinedly at the sidewalk or off into the distance. If natives of the arctic have dozens of words for snow, then women must have a large vocabulary to describe the ground in front of their feet.
When I went to the Multicultural Center to pick up tickets for Northwestern Day at Wrigley Field, the entryway to the building had literature telling how every so many minutes a woman is raped, beaten or abducted. The campus is dotted with blue lights identifying safety phones.
The behavior of women I’ve noted is not unreasonable, and yet for society to exist there must be a willingness to take risk. I cannot imagine living with the concept that one is prey.
With a teen-age daughter these thoughts trouble me, and I wonder about the social cohesion of the 1940s and now. We’ve moved far toward multiculturalism, a good thing, but only to find that we now have unity in anxiety. If we could afford it, and increasingly we can, would we be done with strangers and create our own world from which others are excluded? As I see it, we are rushing to do exactly that. Racism is rightly reviled, but I think our concern for it may distract us from a larger issue.
In contrast to FDR, should President Bush address the nation today, he could truthfully say, surrounded as always by the Secret Service, “The only thing you have to fear is your fellow citizen.”
Forgive me, then, for my lack of enthusiasm for advances such as genetic engineering and nanotechnology fabrication. What we need to fabricate is a society in which our relationships to each other in public can be better than causing apprehension. Inclusion is meaningless if we, whatever our skin color, end up afraid to speak to or even look at a stranger.
Only when women can walk with their heads up and their eyes forward will we be approaching the Great Society.
