I am on the verge of giving up my Facebook page because I keep finding posts with strands of commentary that are simultaneously ignorant and hateful.  It reminds me of the 1960s.  I barely remember George Wallace blocking the door to black students at the University of Alabama – but I do remember it.  I remember the day my mother broke into tears at the news over the radio that someone had shot Martin Luther King.  Last week, a white supremist walked into a temple and open fired on innocent Sikhs because they were a little bit darker and non-Christian – both crimes against insanity.

I am witness to the fear growing in our nation.  Fear of losing our big screen televisions.  Fear that homosexuals might destroy heterosexual marriage if they marry too.  I have watched the ignorant peasants of our society, slaves to a corporate oligarchy that they have willingly created like the Tory colonists still loyal to their king as they were removed from their land by the authority of the very same crown.  Their masters have sent their jobs to Malaysia or Timbuktu, somewhere where the people do not have the power to fight the rich for their dignity.

These anxious haters of anything that goes “bump” in the night are not new to our society nor to our nation.  Only fifty years ago a Senator from Wisconsin named McCarthy had these weak-kneed cowards seeing Communist ghosts under every bed.  He told them that little old ladies were really operatives of a great social evil and were going to take away their Bibles and make them work in collectives.  Lives were ruined.  Careers were made.  Such is the usefulness of gullibility in politics.

This is how it starts, with mass hysteria.  Those who can barely comprehend the complexity of their own checking accounts begin to thump their pitchforks over Grecian debt repayments or public spending not realizing that the very people that they support, the fear mongers who lead them, have robbed the global economy of trillions of dollars and not one of them has gone to jail.  Bankers playing dice with the retirement accounts of millions lost their high-risk bets to foolishness and greed and went out to supper on their yachts while common ruined people struggled to buy a can of beans.  And yet these very people who have suffered so have never once asked for retribution, restitution or even an explanation.  It matters not.  The average American would not understand it anyway.  It is easier to write it off as the will of God.  If God wanted Goldman-Sachs to pay for the devastation it wrought upon the common people, he would have sent a thunder bolt, or perhaps an airplane, through the window of their offices and struck them dead in their comfy chairs.

They blame the government who has actually made money on the stimulus plan, money that now helps us recover from two unnecessary wars that we funded with borrowed Chinese money.  None of these fair peasants with their flaming torches, wrapped in the flag and thumping their holy books is even aware of the true cost of these wars.  They were never recorded in federal budget.

Oh! It must be the poor and the sick who are ruining our country.  It must be them!  When fear comes to into our houses disguised as nightly news, when the entertainers masked as newscasters stir the pot of tragedy and lead us to believe that we have been insulted so that we will by a new luxury car or some laundry detergent from their sponsors — we forget all compassion.  Perhaps not all compassion.   We are still spellbound by the trials and tribulations of a pudgy drunk woman from New Jersey who behaves like an ape for our twisted viewing pleasure.

I have wondered about times like these.  I have wondered how it came to pass that my 9th great grandmother, Susannah “Goodie” Martin, was seized by the townspeople of Salem in 1692.  I have wondered how a community could have become so fearful that they would engage in collective and bizarre fantasies leading them to believe that an elderly widow woman was somehow a supernatural monster simply because she was opinionated and had scolded the wrong man’s daughter.  On the word of a fifteen year old girl, my ancestor was taken out of town in a cart and hung until she was dead.  Her body was thrown in an iron crag.  No grave.  No dignity.  The greater tragedy is that the death of Goodie Martin did not ease the fear of the hysterical, well-meaning Christian community.  Twenty were executed and as many as thirteen died in jail.  The mayhem did not come to an end until one of the hysterical town’s people suggested that the Governor of the colony was perhaps a witch and he, exercising the superior power of his office, swiftly brought the matter to a close.  It was just like magic.

Fear and complexity makes an evil brew.  It is the real witchcraft that turns ordinary people into screaming lunatics.  When the average villager does not know why events are unfolding as they are, she turns to superstition for answers rather than seeking the truth through scholarship or verifiable information.  It only takes a young girl’s voice to cry “witch!” and ordinarily rational people will tear through their own communities like sharks in a blood frenzy.

The lives of people like Goodie Martin, or the Sikhs in the temple last week, are the price we pay.  Ignorance, and only ignorance, is the cause.

We live in complicated times made doubly confusing by technology that is expanding in leaps and bounds.  Blink and everything changes leaving many of us bewildered and afraid.  When we cannot find the answers we need in facts and through critical thinking, many of us turn to fantastical explanations — the equivalent of ontological thumb-sucking.  This would be harmless enough if it were left to the privacy of one’s own thoughts or confined within one’s own home.  But when fear drives the herd to hysteria, we get jihad and crusades and other unholy conflicts.  The villagers rage and tear at their neighbors in the name of a God who hasn’t the slightest idea what the hell they are screaming about.  Perhaps that is why he does not answer their prayers for apocalypse and rapture.  His jaw is on the floor in shock and awe of their insanity.