The Fear Factor

Thanks to e-mail and cheap Internet phone service, expatriate Americans enjoy frequent contact with the folks back home.

This is a real change from the past. My first foray overseas was as a junior-year-abroad student in the mid-1970s. I spoke with my parents exactly once during those 10 months — on Christmas Eve, after waiting nearly an hour at a French post office to be assigned to one of a half-dozen telephone cabins. The operator set up the collect call and then shouted my number when the connection came through. My folks and I spoke for about four minutes, then I slipped back into JYA oblivion until the following July.

Now I hear nearly every week from my brothers, my father, my nephews, a handful of college friends, a former roommate, a Sunday school secretary, my insurance agent — and this is just what I manage to glean from an inbox regularly filled and refilled with ads for male self-improvement products and messages that begin “Hi I am lonely this afternoon.” (More and more, I’m somehow getting spam from my own e-mail address, which has me worried about personality bifurcation. But I digress.)

Of course, a lot of the non-spam messages lately have been about the upcoming presidential election. Americans really are obsessed with politics, which gives us the same sort of charge that sports does. I love this, especially since I can’t really follow U.S. college sports adequately from Morocco. Just in the past few weeks, though, there’s been a theme that I’d not noticed before: fear.

“This is the scariest election we … have ever faced,” one message said.

“I am afraid Obama will lead the country the wrong way, and badly so,” a relative wrote.

Now, these are not fundraising ploys; these are the sincere concerns of private citizens.

Certainly some of the fear is tied to the current economic crisis, but I suspect it has more to do with the possibility there will be a dramatic change in government policies if the Democrats win. Many, of course, would welcome that; a lot of others fear it.

“We’ll end up just like Europe,” is something I’m hearing more and more, both from correspondents back home and from some Americans living abroad.

I presume that people who harbor this fear are worried that there will be an increase in public-sector activity at the risk of losing private-sector dynamism and perhaps even individual liberties. Maybe that is scary.

But if, at least for the short term, we do have to rely on collective approaches to some of our most pressing problems — providing adequate minimal healthcare, creating jobs, protecting retirement pensions, re-establishing reliable sources of credit, improving education — does this necessarily mean that we will somehow lose our national identity? Will the frontier spirit fade away? Will we all suddenly decide that Big Brother knows best and lay down our muskets? Will we retreat into government-subsidized housing, watch state-run television and shuffle out to the mailbox only to retrieve our unemployment or Social Security checks?

I just don’t see it. We are far too ornery a people for that to happen. Ask King George.