I have recently had more run-ins with my old nemesis… Fear. He is a vicious animal that makes my heart race and muddles my thinking (which is ironically very hard to do considering the muddlesome nature of my brain to begin with.)
I posted a political post a couple of days ago suggesting you should shoot yourself in the foot. Fear tells me he likes shooting. He is a card-carrying member of the NRA. Second Amendment rights are more important to him than the First Amendment, the Fourth, the Sixth, and definitely the 15th. He agrees with Donald Trump about Mexicans. We have to seal the border, and if they come across to commit crimes, steal our stuff, and mess up our lovely whitebread world, we oughtta be able to shoot them. Fear likes conservatives in politics. He knows they don’t really mean it when they ask us to give up stuff and give them more money in return for protecting us from all those scary “other people”, but he likes the notion of guns and military to “protect us”. Those “other people”, they are scary. and icky, and awful. We hate them. Let’s kill them. Fear really does say this to me, and I am fairly sure that he says it to other people too. But I have decided I don’t really want to listen.
In fact, I want to stand up to him. I am tired of listening to people whom I care about repeat fear-fueled talking points from Fox News about why white cops who killed black youths without giving them their right to a trial… especially un-armed black youths… were probably justified and were rightfully afraid for their own gun-fortified life. I was mortified when the white cop in McKinney, Texas threw the black girl in the bikini to the ground and put a knee on her back. That was a girl like so many of the ones I have taught in Texas. Sure, she may have said bad words to him… because she was afraid. But she had more reason to be afraid than he did. So, I need to use Mickian magical powers to punch Fear in the nose. This monster will not beat me, even though I am naked and unarmed. I am not afraid.
And here’s the reason why… I love people. I don’t hate them. I don’t fear them. I particularly love some of the people that friends and relatives routinely tell me that they fear. I have had black, Hispanic, and Muslim students that I would die to protect without hesitation. When I stood between a Hispanic boy with a sharp metal throwing star with which he intended to commit a murder, and the boy inside my classroom he was threatening, I was ready to die. He was not entering my classroom while I lived to block the doorway. Fortunately for my stupid, brave self, an even braver History teacher prevented him from getting to me and got him to drop the weapon and run away. Later that day I cried several gallons of tears and thanked God I did not wet my pants on the spot, but that is not the only time in my teaching career that I stepped between two combatants in order to protect them both and end the fight. The secret to those victories was never having a gun or weapon to fight back with. All I had to do to win the battle was overcome Fear… to beat him down and not let him be a factor. You can always talk your way out of any terrible situation. If the person you are talking to knows you are not showing fear, and you bother to tell him or her that you care about not letting them get hurt, even by their own actions… even the most wicked-hearted people are still people and still have a heart. If they don’t, a gun isn’t going to save you anyway. It would’ve helped Ninja-star-boy to have someone supply him with a gun. So I say this without fear. “Fear, you do not have a say in my life! I do not give you any power over my faith, my politics, my daily life, or my loves.”
Now, I am not made of bricks or steel, and I am definitely not bullet-proof. But I am not afraid to say, I am a liberal in my politics. I believe in helping people, not hurting them in the name of Fear. And so, if you Klansmen and white supremacists are offended by that fact and believe you need to punish me for my commie-liberal-sinner crimes, I am ready to tell you that I respect you as a human being, and disrespect every hurtful thing you stand for. I will gladly give you your Fourth and Sixth Amendment rights, and do everything in my power to prevent you from exercising your Second Amendment rights on my poor little (Biblical-word-for-Donkey used as a euphemism).
Oh, and I am not about to tell you where I live. I may be stupid and brave, but nobody is that stupid.
Life is fraught with all sorts of real dangers, and I face them all every day. But I also suffer from acrophobia, the fear of heights. And I can tell you for a fact that it is not a real thing. It is a mental disorder that makes it difficult to get up on a ladder and paint the house. It makes it difficult to walk next to the railing in any balcony. And yet, I have proof that is a phony fear, a goofy fear, an all-in-your-head sort of thing. Not only do I face it and overcome it (I have been able to paint the house), but I love the window seat when riding in an airplane. Looking out the window after take-off is an adventure better than any video game. I love to fly. That irrational fear is a different irrational fear.
Catch a Falling Star 
How It Should Be… According to Mickey
My bicycle was red. It was red and looked just like the ones that Captain Kangaroo had in his commercials that we watched on a black-and-white TV every day before we walked or rode our bicycle to school, across town a whole long seven blocks away. After school I could ride it out a whole mile and a half to Jack’s farm with Bobby and Richard and Mark the preacher’s kid to go skinny dipping in the cold creek in Jack’s South pasture. Jack was younger than any of us except Bobby. And it was a golden age.
Spiderman comic books and Avengers comic books cost twelve cents to own, but they were forbidden. And as much as we sneaked them and passed them around until they fell apart, usually in Bobby’s hands, we never knew that Dr. Wertham had gone to Congress to make our parents believe that comic books would make us gay and violent. He was a psychiatrist who wrote a book, so even if you didn’t believe him, you had to worry about such things.
I believed in Santa Claus until 1967. And after I found out, I only despaired a tiny little bit, because I began to understand you have to grow up. And adults can lie to you, even if they don’t do it to be mean. And the world is a hard place. And the golden age ended in November of 1963 when JFK was assassinated.
In June of 1968 I rode my bicycle out to the Bingham Park woods, Once there, I took off all my clothes and put them in the bicycle basket, and then I rode up and down the walking paths through the trees with nothing between me and God but my skin. I had a serious think about how life should be. All the while I was terrified that someone might see me. I was naked and vulnerable. A mere two years before that I had been sexually assaulted and was terrified of older boys, especially when I was naked and vulnerable. But I was a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals and Bob Gibson. They were repeated World Series winners. And they beat the Yankees in the series in 1964. And more important than that, cardinals were the little red songbirds who never flew away when the winter came. You don’t give up in the face of hardship. You face the trouble. No matter how deep the snow may pile up.
And in 1969, the first man to walk on the moon showed that a Star Trek world was in reach of mankind. Star Trek was on every afternoon after school. I watched a lot of those episodes at Verner’s house on his family’s black-and-white TV. The Klingons were always bested or beaten because the crew of the Enterprise outsmarted them. You can solve the problems of the universe with science. I know this because of all the times Mr. Spock proved it to me not just by telling me so, but by showing me how you do it. And what you can achieve is greatly enhanced if you work together like Spock and Kirk and Bones… and sometimes Scotty always did.
So, what is the way it should be? What did Mickey decide while naked in the forest like a Dakota Sioux shaman on a spirit-quest?
JFK’s 108th birthday was on May 29th. Dr. Wertham has been dead for 44 years. Bob Gibson was 85 when he passed away in October of 2020. Captain Kirk turned 94 in March of this year.
The Golden age is long gone. There is no single set of rules that can clearly establish how it should be now. But I like those ideas of how it should be that I established for myself while naked on a Schwinn Spitfire in a forest long ago.
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Tagged as art, books, fear, golden-age, movies, nakedness, Star Trek