Fear of fear itself

On Xmas eve I had dinner with the lefty neighbors. I have been turning down their invites to socialize with them since they moved in in May of this year. I have to bite my tongue a lot around them, so I thought the dinner would be a trial. It was actually quite nice. My neighbors are 2 sisters, lab bio-engineers,, from Montana. Their mother was here visiting for the holidays and she was a real peach.

A old fashioned style school marm, she was just back from a trip to Uzbekistan. She used to teach there. She was very excited when I mentioned that a young man from Mongolia was living next door. I imagine she doesn't meet that many Mongolians in Montana. In any case she was utterly delightful.

The sisters used to live down the street a ways before moving near me. An ex neighbor, an upper middle class African-American woman was also invited to dinner. I am rarely around African-Americans of her class and was fascinated by her. She was well traveled, she spoke of a recent trip to Portugal, and she was very knowledgable about world affairs. I don't mean to sound racist, but I just have not had much contact with African-Americans who are like her.

Anyway, she was reminicising about the time just after the sisters had moved into their new cottage, when she came by to visit. Jamel and I greeted her and told her the sister's were not at home. "Well, she said, they can't have gone far, all their windows are open."

This turned out not to be the case. The sisters regularly leave the house for days, with the windows wide open. These are ground floor windows.

Somehow this segued into talk about serial killers. The sisters mother had read serial killer profiler John Douglas's book and wanted her daughters to read it.

One daughter said fiercely, " I don't want to talk about this, it's Xmas eve."

The other daughter said, "They are trying to make us afraid, I won't live in fear."

Then it sturck me. I had read the other day that liberals reacted more fearfully to footage of 9/11 than conservatives did. Liberals are always telling us they "don't want to hear" about things that disturb them. Liberals are always writing books about the "politics of fear."

Liberals are the ones who are afraid. They are terrified, all of the time.