Okay, check out this steaming pile of crap.

All this guy did was ask to use women’s phones. That’s it. And yet the media are treating it as if a murdering rapist was on the loose.

But the media, I can understand. Their motives for creating a sensationalist crisis out of thin air are depressingly obvious.

Whatever gets the clicks, right? If it bleeds, it leads. If it doesn’t bleed, try stabbing it a bunch more times, we need a STORY people!

But what is truly upsetting to me is seeing women I love and respect falling for this bullshit. There are women more scared than ever to walk from work to their car because of that story and it’s ALL BULLSHIT.

But I think I know why.

Because fear is fun.

It’s fun to imagine the world as being full of bogeymen. It makes life more exciting without actually risking anything.

And it pays out even further when you have fun imagining that even doing thuddingly mundane things like coming home from work means evading the hordes of criminals and murderers just waiting to take your life.

It’s like little kids scaring each other with ghost stories for fun, except people think this shit is real and just plain ain’t.

But people keep the fear so they can keep the thrill, and get quite upset with me when I dare to contradict their danger fantasies.

And the fear itself is bad enough. I happen to think billions of women living in fear for absolutely no good reason is a BAD thing.

Radical, I know.

But this irrational omniphobia affects how people live their lives, how they choose where to live, how they view their neighbors, and how they vote.

And fear always favours conservatism. The more scared we are of one another because we drank the koolaid on crime being rampant, the more likely we are to vote for right wing politicians who promise to save us from each other.

Without the fear, people would realize that they have nothing to fear from one another and that could lead to the people actually banding together to oppose their oppressors instead of hiding in their bunkers scared of their own shadow, like good Americans.

And that’s exactly how our oppressors want it. They want us mistrustful and paranoid and defensive. It makes it so much easier for them to corral and control us.

It’s exactly this kind of paranoid terror that has led directly to the rise of fascistic heads of state all over the world. People – especially old people – get told by fascists that their lives are in constant danger and only the fascists can save them, and what do youknow, they vote these evil fucks into office.

The only solution is to fight the fear. Refuse to be scared of strangers. Stop imagining muggers and rapists and predatory pedophiles around every corner. Accept the evidence that says you are not only safe now but that this is the safest time to be alive on planet Earth there has ever been, and it keeps getting safer,

And that means we all have to stop playing the Fear Game. We have to give up all titillation and thrill we get out of imagining the world is worse than it is. We have to remind ourselves that the news never shows you what is normal, only what is unusual, and that they reap our fear for cold hard cash.

Stop feeding the beast! Foreswear your fear. Believe in the truth about your fellow human beings : that most of them would never intentionally harm you. That the odds are 99.9 percent that they are no more a criminal than you are, no more likely to steal from you are than you are to steal from then, and that deep down, nobody wants to take your stuff away from you.

We all have our own stuff. Why take someone else’s?

This means we have to face the fact that, at least to our endocrine systems, reality is boring. The actual truth is that you are safe. Perfectly safe.

And there’s always going to be a primitive part of our minds that simply cannot accept that. If we let it, it will invent all kinds of imaginary dangers in order to justify its fears.

But reality doesn’t work that way. Emotions are not evidence. You cannot say, “I am scared, therefore there is something scary happening”. That’s insane.

As human beings (emphasis on human), we have the capacity to overcome irrational fear. We can override our unjustified emotions and send them packing. We can choose to embrace higher compassion and love one another without the fear our oppressors poured into our minds to make sure we don’t get together and change things.

Media is not reality. The fact that TV is full of crime shows might make it seem like crime is everywhere, but all it really means is that crime sells.

In the real world, the statistics are clear : Crime is quite rare. Violent crime is even more rare, and when it does occur, it looks a lot more like a bar fight than a slasher movie.

The rarest form of crime of all is stranger on stranger crime. And yet, the media would have you believe that it happens all the time.

I want people to stand up to the fear. To refuse to fall into the right wing’s trap of paranoia and delusion. To be able to look the forces of false chaos and “fear for fun” right in the eye and say, “I am safe. And I am not afraid.

I know people will fight me on this because I am attacking a deep foundational belief that runs very deep into the hearts and minds of everyone, even liberals.

But I don’t care. I fight for truth and sanity because that’s how I am made. I don’t care if the truth is unpopular and sanity just isn’t much fun.

I am safe.

And I am not afraid.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.