Remember to hope, not fear

This morning I’m feeling an emotion that I haven’t experienced in a long time: Fear. I wondered if it was something I ate last night but no, it’s fear and its being driven by Rupert Murdoch and the right wing press. Now, I used to be no stranger to fear. I’ve lived in some dodgy parts of Scotland where local gangs liked to shoot people with crossbows in the pub at the bottom of my street. I’ve been scared to walk home late at night in leafy Kingston upon Thames after being threatened by a junkie I stopped stealing stuff from a shop.  I’ve been on a street in Glasgow late at night where someone got shot in front of me.

The point is that my standard state nowadays is not one of fear, it’s one of hope.  Having met thousands of people over the course of my life, I have high hopes for humanity.  I see that we bleed the same, we wish for the same things, we love our children in the same ways.  I hope that we can live in a society where we can accept each other as human beings, can look beyond stereotypes and into the humanity in each others hearts. It’s why I’m a liberal and always will be, I hope for a better world.  A world with less fear and less need for fear.

That’s why I’m surprised this morning to be feeling it and I wonder if I understand the nation a little more. A friend of mine once told me that her abiding memory of being a Christian was one of fear. Fear of the Devil, fear of burning in hell.  Now, I’m not for a second saying that all Christians are like this, totally not and my family and friends would be appalled if I thought that.  The heart of the real Christian message is love, I know that, though I myself am an atheist.   I am just amazed at how closely together those two things, love and fear, sit and that people in this country who believe themselves to be moral, loving people are being driven by fear.  Being controlled by fear.

The right wing press have upped the ante and are stirring fear like I’ve never seen it before.  Fear of a hung parliament, fear of a nuclear attack that we cannot defend, fear of immigrants, fear of Europe, fear of the other, the unknown.  And I’m starting to fear them! This is what I must watch out for, what we all must watch out for. The game of fear is the old politics game, the old world game, the game that keeps us divided and separate, hoarding resources and letting people with less die.

The new politics is a story of hope and dare I say it, of love. Love for other people regardless of whether they feel, look, sound like us.  Hope for a world where people’s voices count, where a vote matters, where we have a press that reports what happens not what they would prefer happened.  I hope for the capacity to love my fellow human beings even when they stand for things that appal me for that is the future I want to live in.  I want to be the change, not just call for the change from others and it is in situations like this that I have to remind myself of that.

Photo by mattwi1s0n on CC