By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

“Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.”–John Lennon

If you’re desperately trying to make sense out of all you see around you, dear reader, you’re not alone. We’re witnessing a world population struggling with decisions about what is necessary, ethical and forward-thinking as opposed to a knee-jerk legitimizing of bias, hatred, repression and alarm. Some have said this current chaos ushers in the twilight of humanity’s dominance on the earth: our species’ final nihilistic period, the waning of culture and the dying gasp of the consciousness that set all this mayhem in motion.

Well, maybe that last one. Perhaps the consciousness that has provoked all this — presently embodied on these shores in the personage of one Donald J. Trump, egoist and brandmeister — has finally condensed itself into an energy that we can recognize as both vitriolic and suicidal. Yet, even though we recognized the sadly familiar spirit of churlishness and fear-mongering coming on like a slow-moving train, we couldn’t stop the national pandemonium inspired by the murders in San Bernadino.

We’re wading through a re-do of paranoia and Chicken Little projection of dire threat from the ‘enemy’ that’s familiar to all of us, now that we’ve begun to label our security in a faintly Germanic-sounding “homeland” package. No, nobody is asking why you aren’t wearing your flag pin, but don’t be surprised if you’re asked for your green card or quizzed on your religious preferences.

No doubt about it, we’re experiencing 9/11, version 2.0. We’re suffering through a re-do of, as FDR named it, “fear of fear itself,” although, to our credit, some of us have the presence of mind to wonder just who the enemy actually is. To those of us who have clung to rationality like a life-raft, things that come out of the current political frontrunner’s mouth seem so extreme and dangerous as to make even the most peaceful citizen want to punch his nose.

If fascism is, indeed, the confluence of political and corporate power, then the Donald is our homegrown Il Duce, appealing to our darkest emotions and pandering to our most deeply held apprehensions. Who can argue the point when even Uncle Dick Cheney tells us Trump’s proposals are unAmerican? (Particularly poignant, since I often refer to Dick as “he who cannot be named,” and now JK Rowling has determined that the Donald is WORSE than Voldemort.)

Although I sometimes think of Donald as an unloved child, a black hole of bratty dysfunctionality unable to be sated by vast amounts of validation and attention, he is also that cynical elitist who will use any device against his competition in order to win. Trust Donald when he says he’s a winner. That defines how he sees himself and his purpose, and he will let nothing get in his way, let alone the good of everyone else on the planet.

It’s all so extreme, isn’t it? A virtual workshop in noticing and responding to extremism. We are faced with extreme weather, extreme politics, extreme violence, extreme inequality. Worse, we’ve accepted that as the ‘new normal,’ just one more condition to have to stuff down into the garbage chute of worrisome prospects. At the base of all this there IS an enemy, humankind’s oldest and most ruthless enemy of all: fear.

Fear is like a wall of darkness that rises within our reptilian brain to block out all reasonable and reassuring human emotion, like compassion, pity and empathy. It raises specters of ancient wounds and amplifies emotions long buried. Fear nags at us, even when we know it isn’t rational, holding us prisoner to all that is unhealed within us.

There’s a reason they’re called “night terrors,” sneaking out to goad us when our conscious mind is no longer guarding the door. And there, where the little man behind the curtain can project the most worrisome images on our imagination, we must learn to combat them with the words of Lao Tsu: “There is no illusion greater than fear.” That concept must become so real to us that we can bring its power to our lucid dreaming experience, banishing the shadows and healing our souls. We can only accomplish that with practice at facing our fears, and the universe — in concert with this shifting planetary era — has given us the opportunity to do so.

Here’s a very bright spot on our horizon: many of us have done our homework, it seems. Here in the real world, as Elaine Goodman’s excellent piece earlier this week points out, we are seeing formidable backlash against Trump and the fear-inspired energy he represents, what I think of as “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” As proof, mid-week, friend and reader Geoff Marsh sent a link to news of the British outpouring of disfavor in petitioning that Trump be denied a visa to visit Britain. By Wednesday they had collected over 370,000 signatures, which means that the petition must be considered for debate by Parliament.

Scotland’s First Minister has stripped Trump of his status as a business ambassador for Scotland, and Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University has revoked his honorary degree in recognition of his achievements as an entrepreneur and businessman. Kudos to our cousins across the pond for smacking Trump on the snout with a rolled up copy of the Guardian!

They’re not the only ones, now that Donald has tarnished his brand. A billboard with the likeness of Donald and his daughter was removed from the construction site of a Dubai golf course, and Lifestyle, one of the Middle East’s largest retail chains, has removed his products from their shelves.

Trump’s one-size-fits-all understanding of the Muslim religion is finally being confronted by that population, which until now was quiet on the subject (so as not to incite riots, I suppose). Polls tell us that Muslims are the LEAST violent religion in this country, and certainly the least loud in their own defense, but that’s changing. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote a scathing op-ed for the Times saying, in part, that Trump’s “cruel and dim-witted” line of thinking “is not the stuff presidents are made of.”

Muhammad Ali called on politicians to educate their constituents on Islam, adding, “I am a Muslim and there is nothing Islamic about killing innocent people in Paris, San Bernardino, or anywhere else in the world. True Muslims know that the ruthless violence of so-called Islamic Jihadists goes against the very tenets of our religion.”

Fareed Zakaria came out as a Muslim in a fiery opinion piece, saying that he felt compelled to do so as an American because he was appalled by Trump’s bigotry. In an interview on CNN, he said that he’d seen this kind of rhetorical attack on a people in the Balkans and Iraq, turning neighbor against neighbor and creating ghettos of exclusion that invariably become hotbeds of defensive radicalism. The American model of inclusion for Muslims has been the gold standard in peaceful cultural assimilation, he continued, something Europe has been unable to replicate. This current wave of xenophobia, combined with election politics, threatens that successful model and gives America a black eye.

This is, gratefully, a robust response to Trump’s low-level proposals, and so today we can pull that curtain back just a bit and remember that there are fewer Pubs than Dems, and those Dems — accused of being politically lethargic in all but election years — very often belong to a DNA mix the Donald would not approve. If our citizens need motivation to get out the vote, the Donald is a first-class motivator!

Although the religous/Bagger base will pick among the most extreme of the candidates — yes, perhaps our self-serving reality show host — only about 10 percent of the party supports him, and that’s fading fast. All of us are getting our reflection in the mirror, it appears, and I’m going to give Lindsey Graham — a man who knows a bit about fear-mongering himself — virtual head pats for saying, “I’d rather lose this election without him than win it with him. There’s no shame in losing an election. The shame comes when you lose your honor.”

Jon Stewart’s replacement, Trevor Noah, put the mirror up tall and wide by doing a brilliant piece on Donald as “the white ISIS.” Like it or not, the mirror is everywhere we look now.

“The enemy is fear,” said Gandhi. “We think it is hate, but it is fear.” So here we are, subject to the fear-inspired hatefulness around us, our own fear-consciousness nibbling at our conscience and asking for an action plan. Of course, the only plan to defeat the worst of humankind’s oldest enemy is the one we speak of so often here, the choice of love over fear, inspiration over defeatism, life over death.

Our Len Wallick writes, of yesterday’s New Moon, “While we do not in fact know whether or not today’s New Moon in Sagittarius will at long last herald an awakening to a new order worthy of its name, we have reason to be skeptical. Yet, because we can see it in the sky (and more importantly, in ourselves) we also have reason to believe it possible.”

We see it in ourselves. That is where we should have been looking all along, fearlessly examining what we have brought into manifestation. It is always what we collectively bring to the table that counts, and it appears that more of us are taking responsibility for ourselves now, and for a more compassionate way forward, than we are being lead to believe.

Here is the act that pulls back the curtain to expose the little man pulling the levers on our fears: each fear we face gives us an opportunity to strengthen our character, swing wide the bars of our prison of doubt and self-sabotage, and choose love as an antidote to all that ails us. We have forgotten that fear is a choice. We’ve forgotten that we can choose again.

Do you want to become an activist this season, but don’t know how? Choose love. Pass along a smile, pay it forward, lend a hand. Get involved, offer kindness, model a belief that you can make a difference. Stay open to the highest and most life-affirming possibilities, and share your hopes for tomorrow with those who will listen. So my dears, in a season made holy by humankind’s most heart-felt affirmations for the birth of unconditional love, let your Light shine as a beacon to fearless belief in a brighter tomorrow.