April 2019

Today it looks to me like there are youngsters who still fight and those who give in to fear like every generation before…

December 2014

Fear!

I think it is one of the biggest motivators in human behaviour. No matter how you look at it ~  from a kind of biological angle where it just is a warning system to avoid damages to oneself to psychology or even spirituality where it is said to be make-believe of things that might or might not happen and stop us to become successful and happy ~ it has a huge impact on your life.

Some use its energy to create and develop great things. Some use its energy to stop themselves from standing up for their rights and in worst cases even from living at all.

I believe the powerful know exactly how immense important fear is in one’s life but I suspect they have realised it for what it is: Mostly an illusion of what might happen and they use it as a means of power over someone else to gain whatever they want to gain.

My life has been ruled by fear for a long time. Fear of life, my body, closeness, happiness because of what happened in my past. It is still part of my life, but I have realised that I need to have a close look at it and see what is a real danger and what is just make-believe and what could happen.

Most of my fears have no grounding in any reality. I just project incidents from my past into the future and expect things to go how they went in my past. But situations change all the time. You never know what might happen. And it feels so much freer not to project anything into the future and just to go with the flow. Most things sort themselves out in the end.

When I was a teenager, I read about Sophie Scholl, who fought with her brother and her friends against the Nazi’s at Munich University and got imprisoned and executed for it. She wrote a lot about the fear of being found out and the fear of death. Still, she did what she believed was right to do. Still, she fought against a totalitarian Regime so much more powerful than herself and her friends.

She stood up for freedom, human rights and humanity itself. In Europe, we do not have to fight against totalitarian governments it seems to me rather we have to fight against capitalism itself. Companies work a lot with our fears. They earn money with insurances mostly for things you cannot insure yourself against anyway, or they make you work more and more because of the fear to lose one’s job.

And when I look at young people it seems to me a lot of them have given in into the belief that they are helpless and cannot stand up for their rights and gain a better life. They don’t even seem to realise that they have rights that they can fight for. Is that the future the Veterans of WWII have fought for? Just another form of a totalitarian regime much bigger than any government could create?

Are the values these youngster feel highly about are really only to be allowed to shop whenever they want? Is that something one must fight for? Is that what our society teaches our children? It scares me to read that some young person thinks restricted Sunday opening hours are outdated, and he or she wants to have the right to shop whenever they want.

Good grief where will that lead us? What kind of society will we live in where consumerism is more important than the right of an employee to spend the weekend with his or her children and have a set day off work. Maybe I am old-fashioned but I believe workers have rights and are not slaves of their employers. It is us who give employers this power if we do not stand up for what we believe is our right. Will we be able to stand up against our fear and stand up for our rights?