GLOBAL FEAR

By Leonardo Padura and - - Reprint | | Print |

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HAVANA, Dec 12 2006 (IPS) - Never before in human history has fear been so concrete and endemic, affecting so many people in so many places at once, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban journalist and writer whose novels have been translated into a dozen languages. In this article, the author writes that violence, as an expression of social, political, and even personal relations, has developed into the habitual response of not only individuals but also social groups and nations, with the result that fear extends into every level of society. There are types of fear that are stoked and manipulated by the powerful: fear of change, of difference, in people as well, like immigrants, fear of that which diverges from the interests or dominion of power. It is clear that not all violence is irrational and gratuitous but almost always has economic, social, or political roots related to marginalisation, poverty, or, at the other extreme, the arrogance of the powerful. Our lives today are fenced in by terrorism and antiterrorism, preventive wars, cold wars. There are no safe places left, there is no margin for innocent attitudes; almost no one can escape from fear, starting with the most powerful, who are in need of more and more bodyguards.

I’m not sure what I was thinking at the time, but I stood up and only then did the boy notice that I was present. For a moment, knife in hand, he turned to look at the dogs, then looked at the knife and slowly walked away, muttering something under his breath.

When the boy was out of sight, I wondered what might have happened if he had tried to attack my dogs. Apart from shouting, would I have been able to respond? Would I have gone up to him despite his weapon? What is a person capable of who reacts to such an anodyne and commonplace scene by pulling out a knife and going after the ”threat”? And why was the young man armed at all?

The next day I told the story to my barber and his response left me frankly amazed. ”Didn’t you know? Most of those boys go around armed. It used just fist fights, but now they draw their knives and they use them.”

The sight of the armed boy, my two barking dogs, and my own fear has not left me — maybe because I saw in it the alarming expression of a phenomenon that affects almost all of us inhabitants of the earth: what you might call ”global fear”.

It is well known that the streets of the world are less safe, that the traditional and emerging gangs and mafias dominate urban areas more and more, imposing their rules and ways of doing things, and that the expressions of street violence are found as much in rich societies as in poor ones, because they are both incubated by inequality of opportunity and reality, which is now a universal phenomenon.

However, never before in human history has fear been so concrete and endemic, affecting so many people in so many places at once. Violence, as an expression of social, political, and even personal relations, has developed into the habitual response of not only individuals but also social groups and nations, with the result that fear extends into every level of society, consigning people to a permanent state of insecurity and unease.

It is clear that there are types of fear that are stoked and manipulated by the powerful: fear of change, of difference, in people as well, like immigrants, fear of that which diverges from the interests or dominion of power. And it is also clear that not all violence is irrational and gratuitous but almost always has economic, social, or political roots related to marginalisation, poverty, or, at the other extreme, the arrogance of the powerful.

Violence and its child, fear, are everywhere, uncontainable, ubiquitous, penetrating. They are an important and active part of what Mayakovski called (referring to a society that reinforced fear) ”the petrified shit of the present”.

The lives of all of us today are bounded by terrorism and antiterrorism, preventive wars, cold wars, thieves, police, emigrants, fundamentalists, gangs, desperados of every stripe, identity thieves. There are no safe places left, and no margin for innocent attitudes. Almost no one can escape fear, starting with the most powerful, who are in need of more and more bodyguards.

I doubt that even in the darkest period of the Cold War was fear so massive and invasive. During the Cold War there was always the illusion that common sense might prevail and the extinction of the human race could be avoided. Today the atomic fear is back, only more combustive and wild, compounded by other fears, and common sense seems lost. People live between bomb threats and bomb explosions, between bans, limitations, and alerts that are supposed to protect us but in fact intensify fear and uncertainty and make us weaker and more manageable. It is a world that not even Orwell could have imagined.

It is logical that something as primitive as a young man with a knife in his hand on a Havana street can arouse a visceral and concrete fear. However, this armed youth is above all else proof that once violence is set off, it can strike you in the most peaceful of settings. He serves as both the product and representation of the way of life and the social logic with which we are entering the 21st century: that any threat, however innocuous (a pair of barking dogs), can be met with a far greater, and, most important, a far more violent, response. Force, aggression, and overwhelming contempt are now the responses to virtually any action. Fear becomes a constant, the global sentiment of the inhabitants of a world which, nonetheless, some of us still believe could be a pleasant and desirable place to live — without bombs, knives, walls, terrorism, without the proliferation of police and laws against individual liberties, and perhaps without so much fear. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)