Obama, tear down this wall of fear!

A few minutes of surfing the Internet quickly reveals a disturbing trend: Americans are becoming increasingly fearful of the one institution that they have held with some degree of contempt since the nation’s founding, and that is their very government.
The cloud now hanging over America’s national mood is more understandable when we consider the escalation of events over the past decade. Somewhere between the clunky bookends of the terrorist attacks of Sept 11, 2001 and Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations of 2013, the United States began to appear less of a democratic superpower and more a repressive kingdom of fear, a neurotic empire of anxiety that trusts nobody, least of all itself.
Despite efforts to blame America’s slow-motion nervous breakdown on the Great Recession of 2008, that diagnosis shoots wide of the mark.  Nevertheless, it can’t be denied that the government’s massive bailout of the bankers and corporations has created a level of political cynicism throughout America - and the world - that lacks historic parallels. At the very least, it rammed home the ugly truth that politicians are more comfortable in bed with corporate lobbyists than in Congress defending the rights of the taxpayers.

With that said, the current level of fear and loathing now weighing down American society did not take root at the local level. Instead, the fear seems to have trickled down from above, perspiration rolling down Washington's brow, so to speak, soaking the grassroots. The smell of fear is real, scientists say, and being scared is contagious.
In fact, the cornerstone in the foundation of our ‘Kingdom of Fear’ (the title of a 2003 book on the subject of America’s rising police state by the late Hunter S. Thompson) was set in place following the 9/11 terror attacks, when the entire nation was consumed by legitimate fear. 

This 11 September, 2001 file photo shows smoke billowing up after the first of the two towers of the World Trade Center collapses in New York City.

Although George W. Bush said Osama bin Laden attacked America because he “hated our freedoms,” the self-proclaimed ‘war president’ gave the Al-Qaeda leader exactly what he hoped to achieve by attacking America in the first place. With no loss of irony or shame, the Neocons opportunistically used the chaos of 9/11 as a convenient smokescreen to crack down on hard-fought civil liberties enshrined in the US Constitution. 


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