Indemnification without Representation August 25, 2007 – Posted in: Aberrant Normalcy

Have you seen these new insurance commercials on television? These are some of the craziest I’ve ever seen. In one, you travel down the road in the driver seat of a car. Before a group of apartment-style mailboxes, a mailman smiles and delivers the mail. The scene abruptly morphs into a man with a sledgehammer, swinging wildly at the mailboxes, presumably trying to break them open. Another commercial shows a house slowly filling with water, all your possessions flowing out the front door like jetsam. In yet another, your burning house crumbles to ashes. You are left with dust.

These are some interesting times we live in, as the Chinese like to say. I see these commercials as a symptom of the larger issue at hand: that we are a terrified people. While the actual chances of being killed in a terrorist attack are orders of magnitude less than winning the lottery, we’ve managed to remake our entire society into one of fear. Do you remember when we were told to buy duct tape? To stock up on bottled water? Now with Katrina, and the ineptitude of the federal government, we’re not only afraid of man-made calamities, but natural ones too. We have been cowed.

And really, what are we doing about this state of fear? Or rather, State of Fear? We’re preparing, readying, buying indemnities. Instead of acting in a way to reduce the number of threats in our lives, we’re assuming they’re inevitable and planning for them. That’s the most insidious kind of evil, because when you presuppose something is going to happen, you subconsciously act to bring it about. Instead of buying flood, fire, calamity insurance, why aren’t we acting to reduce global warming and extreme weather events? Instead of walking around in a fearful trance, looking askance at that Arabic-looking man on the subway/train/bus with the large package and wondering if he’s just some Joe on his way home from a long day at work or a murderous fanatic who believes that greedy, godless Americans should all be killed, why aren’t we getting the hell out of Iraq and reaching out to the moderate Arab world and letting them know the West has absolutely no intention of destroying Islam? Surely, it’s not just the job of the State Department.

It seems to me that we have taken a crouched, safe position, instead of a pro-active one out of fear, and I think that simply blaming the current administration for the state of affairs is a cop-out, really. We could be doing something infinitely more useful than waiting for Shrub to bring the troops home.