Titanic Post

Fear is an insidious destroyer of a good time, also fear is bad for your health. To deal with fear, people are always looking over their shoulder to see how close they are to something bad happening. Fearful people are forever devising strategies to be safe, secure, and protected from all the worlds evils. To escape bad happenings, people hoard things—things and money, and they organize their world in such a way so as to preclude bad things happening . They become Republicans.

And yet, bad things happen anyway. Life is not fair. For example: In Otero County and Southern New Mexico, as in most of the country, the wolf had been hunted to extinction, Apaches and Mexicans were marginalized and killed to make life safe for the Anglos who had migrated here from Texas, via Appalachia, and originally, Northern Ireland.

Oteto County is one of the greatest places on earth to live in my opinion. It is also the conspiracy capitol of Southern New Mexico. In the past two years alone the that there is were attempts at reintroducing the wolf, listing our White Sands National Monument as a World Heritage Site, building a new library—all shot down by the vocal yokels. Fear of the wolf, fear of the U.N., and fear of uncontrolled knowledge were visible behind their rational excuses. Their greatest fears are of liberals, people of color, new ideas, loosing their sense of control over their lives, and especially having to pay taxes for social services for dark skinned people. This fear swings easily to anger and hate.

Such fear is called by psychologist, theriophobia. Theriophobia is projection at its worst and it has to do with the wholesale slaughter of wolves and the only term that explains killing of this type. Theriophobia is fear of the beast. A fear of the beast as an irrational, violent, insatiable, uncontrollable creature. At the core of theriophobia is the fear of one’s own nature. In its most violent form theriophobia is projected into a single animal, the animal becomes a scapegoat and is, in the case of the wolf, annihilated. It describes many of our citizens here, who are basically good and decent people. With the proper treatment, they could become Democrats.