Fear and Loathing in Sun City

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen

The longer I am out here blogging, the more I see that a very large issue among third stagers is fear. By far the most viewed post I have written was about taking risks and, in response to a recent post about cynicism, I received an email comment defending it as "risk insurance."

Choosing to be happy takes a degree of fearless risk-taking.  The Happy Person can be a blip on the emotional radar of many people who have chosen to be mean or spiteful at that moment; these people seeing their behaviors towards the Happy Person as not being mean or spiteful but being cautionary and supportive of "reality." 

Apparently if you are openly happy you are asking for trouble. It's one point of view.

And of course it is true that our culture instills fear in elders for profit, to get us to buy devices, live in security buildings, dose ourselves with medications, buy more insurance. Is it any wonder that we are afraid to answer the phone once we know that we are the most-targeted victims of scams in the universe? That younger people expect we won't be able to remember who called us anyway?

It is a maddeningly madder world all the time. Everything changes, and the older we get, the faster that happens. It is confusing to our, um, more deliberate brains, and learning curves are steep. Electronic devices send cultural trends spinning out like viruses and reality shows (whatever happened to entertainment?) create new celebrities so fast you can't learn to spell their names before they are gone. It is easy to give up trying to keep up. It is easy to feel ineffectual.

Add to this the general paranoia induced by terrorist alerts, school shooters, police riots, and the unbelievable amount of societal violence we live with today, and how do we NOT feel like a victim? How do we maintain our ability to take a reasonable risk - like taking the bus to a class, traveling abroad alone, or walking home from a movie after dark?

I would like to know what readers do to keep up their attitude. I would say that gathering information before I believe anything has been my best defense. As a close follower of the political, I learned long ago to disbelieve most everything I read or see, after a few years almost not hearing the lies at all, as if I were teflon and they wouldn't stick. This condition was brought about by a lot of research to find out for myself what to believe - almost never what I had heard. It is the same whether social security is about to tank or there is a terrorist in every basement, if you take the time to look things up and compare stories, to read some history, to think about what you are being told, it is likely to be personally less frightening and more enabling.

However you do it, don't be afraid to be your own advocate. You can choose to not feel like a victim. Do what makes you happy: go out and dance, shop, travel, sing in a choir. Don't hide your light under a barrel, and don't let the buggers get you down.