sadoeuphemist (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sadoeuphemist) wrote2017-03-24 09:51 am
sadoeuphemist) wrote2017-03-24 09:51 am
Don't Be Afraid
There is nothing at all you have to be afraid of.
Fear is an immediate, visceral response based on proximity, a close and present danger. A threat to your continued existence. And yet your life, your hands, your children, your friends, your country, your identity has been extended outward, trembling at the touch of a spider's leg upon your extremities. A shiver goes running up your spine. Your brain has been extracted from your skull and placed in a great glass bowl that magnifies your senses. You can see for thousands of miles, you can sense vibrations from continents away. Good lord. People are dying. A great bristling hairy menace crawls across the land. The air trembles at its name.
Know that you are safe in here.
You will not die, and you will not die, and you will not die. The great glass bowl inoculates you from consequence. You will go about your day steeping in your own worry, a-tremble at every twitch and tremor, sick with a morbid compassion, perfectly safe from harm. People will be slaughtered, in ones and twos and tens and thousands, and you will know them only tangentially at best, names and faces that flicker across the glass. Friends, acquaintances, perhaps, but no one so close that you would be dragged down with them. It couldn't happen here and it has happened here and it will never happen to you.
Look at the statistics, look at the facts. At all the people who have died, and all and all and all the people who have lived.
You have no reason at all to be afraid.
Fear is an immediate, visceral response based on proximity, a close and present danger. A threat to your continued existence. And yet your life, your hands, your children, your friends, your country, your identity has been extended outward, trembling at the touch of a spider's leg upon your extremities. A shiver goes running up your spine. Your brain has been extracted from your skull and placed in a great glass bowl that magnifies your senses. You can see for thousands of miles, you can sense vibrations from continents away. Good lord. People are dying. A great bristling hairy menace crawls across the land. The air trembles at its name.
Know that you are safe in here.
You will not die, and you will not die, and you will not die. The great glass bowl inoculates you from consequence. You will go about your day steeping in your own worry, a-tremble at every twitch and tremor, sick with a morbid compassion, perfectly safe from harm. People will be slaughtered, in ones and twos and tens and thousands, and you will know them only tangentially at best, names and faces that flicker across the glass. Friends, acquaintances, perhaps, but no one so close that you would be dragged down with them. It couldn't happen here and it has happened here and it will never happen to you.
Look at the statistics, look at the facts. At all the people who have died, and all and all and all the people who have lived.
You have no reason at all to be afraid.