When Franklin Delano Roosevelt uttered his famous phrase, "Theonly thing we have to fear is fear itself," at his first inaugural address in 1933, he recognized that fear of the Great Depression could paralyze people and interfere with ways to address an unprecedented economic crisis. He realized that catastrophic thinking and overwhelming anxiety had the power to harm his plan for economic (and political) recovery.
Roosevelt in a wheelchair.
(Image by Wikipedia (commons.wikimedia.org), Author: Margaret Suckley) Details Source DMCA
He recognized, as Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl did, that "between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
FDR and Frankl were both right, and in many ways, we find ourselves in that space where fear and insecurity reside, inhibiting our ability to respond appropriately and effectively to the political, economic, and emotional situation we find ourselves in as a nation as we approach the most crucial election of our time.
In his 1941 State of the Union address, FDR also said that there was "nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy." He noted that he looked forward to "a world founded upon four essential human freedoms, as the New York Times pointed out in an op-ed by Jamelle Bouie last month. Those were the freedom of speech and expression, the freedom of every person to worship God in his [sic] way, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear. They were the guiding lights of his New Deal, and "they remained the guiding lights of his administration through the trials of World War II," as Bouie reminds us.
In his essay, Bouie also enumerated four freedoms that today's Republican party embraces. They are, he says, the freedom to control, the freedom to exploit, the freedom to censor, and the freedom to menace. "Roosevelt's four freedoms," he claims, "were the building blocks of a humane society - a social democratic aspiration for egalitarians then and now. These Republican freedoms are also building blocks not of a humane society but of a rigid and hierarchical one, in which you can either dominate or be dominated."
It's a parallel vision of a future in which we do not have the basic freedoms and human rights that FDR espoused. Should the Republicans win the White House and the Congress next year, we will find ourselves living in a theocratic, oppressive country driven by oligarchs and dictators who embrace fear, violence, and autocracy with absolutely no regard for fundamental freedom, privacy or self-determination.
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