We are no strangers to the fear
that certain events can bring us
from natural disasters to those
caused by humans, weather war,
violence or financial history offers
a perspective and lessons on how
to manage what the future brings.
Historian Felix Spinel and I recently
looked back at some of the most
fearful moments in our nation.
So as the global economy is
collapsing in late 1920s,
you have political upheaval.
Here at home, President Roosevelt
is elected in 1932, and it's,
you know, it's no coincidence
that in his inaugural address,
he says, you know,
the only thing we have
to fear is fear itself.
And I've read dokar
of our national life. Hey
leadership up frankness and vigor.
Has met with that understanding and
support of the people themselves,
which is essential to victory,
and he's the Roosevelts a good leader.
Whatever your political stripe is,
Roosevelt was a master of communicating
with the public to help ease their fears,
and he tried to explain very
carefully very calmly about like well,
the money was here.
The money was there and there's really,
you know, sort of nothing to worry about
because we're addressing these things.
So there's sort of this.
This rise of mass media and that big
economic collapse was sort of a perfect
storm for being able to sort of stoke fears.
If you wanted to.
But also to allay fears if
you were someone like FDR,
we're trying to get the economy
back on track.
Cuban
missile crisis. I was not around for that,
but I have heard reports from my
family members about doing drills
at school. Yeah, it's you know,
both both have been super powers.
EU S and the Soviet Union had nuclear
weapons pointed at each other.
Cuban missile crisis meant that we
teetered on the brink of nuclear
war closer than we ever came again,
mass Media played a role in this,
with President Kennedy going on television
showing the pictures of the Cuban,
the Soviet missile bases.
In Cuba now this hits very
close to home for me.
I wasn't born yet,
but I'm the youngest of a big family of
nine kids and I think there were seven
of us in 1962 along with my parents
and my dad told me the late father said,
you know,
and he'd lived through World War Two.
He went through all kinds of nasty stuff,
but he said in 1962 he sat there in Kirkland,
in our house, watching TV,
thinking there's nothing I
can do to protect my family.
I'm scared for them so that inspired
him to build a Fallout Shelter.
So they added a basement
addition to our house,
concrete sealing concrete walls,
and that's that's that fear.
Acting on his fear to do something,
to protect himself or reduce
the the cause of the fear.
That's classic human behavior right there,
and my father only admitted it many decades
later that he'd been fearful that day,
or at that time,
back in October of 1962.
Wow,
let's Fast forward to the year 2000.
Y2K. There was a lot of fear and
advanced preparation around that.
A lot of people thinking that
they just like creating a bunker.
We're gonna have to create a place
where they had extra supplies.
Yeah, the idea was that computers that
have been created decades earlier.
Weren't going to recognize what
it turned from 1999 to 2000.
Those computers would think it was
1900 and you know it calamity would
ensue because all these different
systems running things from traffic
lights to fire alarms might go haywire
and cause all this kind of upset.
But the drums were beat for
that many years in advance.
Businesses and local governments and
federal government spent millions if
not billions of dollars to prepare
to make sure their systems were
ready when the clock tipped over
to midnight on New Year's Eve 1999.
And as far as I know,
nothing bad happened from that
moving on now into a very sad moment.
In our nation's history,
911 after it happened, there were
a lot of things that cause fear,
and some of that fear blood into
violence and racial violence.
Yeah, and that's that.
That's the main thing I take away from 9/11.
Is that fear of the other?
You know, we in this like it happened,
World War Two, fear of Japanese,
and they rounded up Japanese Americans
and put them in concentration camps
here in America, against Constitution.
There's all kinds of violence against
Arab Americans or people who were
perceived to be Arab Americans or
Muslims in the wake of 911 and 911.
Oh, that's.
That's the closest we've come in my
lifetime to experiencing war, you know,
coming under attack like that and I
always remember President Bush again.
Whether you support his politics or not,
he gave a brilliant speech that sort of ease
the fears when he stood there at night,
at Ground Zero and said, you know,
if you had that before like I hear you.
I can hear you the rest of the
world hears you and the people.
And the people who knocked these
buildings down will hear all of us soon.
Second, that
the antidote to fear is action,
not stupid action like doing something
that's totally unrelated to what the
source of the theorist but smart action
to eliminate the source of the fear,
or at least reduce the
danger of being harmed by.
And that was that was a classic moment,
was probably the best speech President
George Bush ever gave. Let's
talk about a moment.
Where action couldn't help out
many people and it was a time that
created a lot of fear in the future.
The Great Recession.
It was a time when we began to see
the divide of the classes and the
middle class starts to disappear,
setting us up.
Kind of where we're at right now,
yeah, and it was.
This is only 2008 2009 when the
overextended mortgage industry,
including Washington Mutual,
here in Washington, the biggest bank
failure in American history and a lot
of people faced a terrible human fear.
One of the worst.
Here's a face like I'm gonna lose my home.
Yeah, I can be able to feed my kids
I gotta lose the dignity this is all
it's all this idea of fear of losing
these things or being attacked by the
other or somehow having taken away.
It's it's a very core of human
identity and human dignity,
and that Great Recession just struck
so many people who had no idea had
no idea was even on the horizon.
Yeah, and and you sort of see
the beginnings of the political
period that we're in now.
I think you could trace back to that,
you know, 2008 2009, the real distinct.
Distinction between classes of mega
wealthy and middle class people you know.
I love history because you can tell the
beginning, middle, and end of the story.
Right now we're in the middle
of the story and I have.
I have fears about, you know,
climate change about the political
upheaval of the last five or six years.
Social upheaval of the last two years.
You know the the the pandemic
of the last almost two years.
I do have hope and optimism
that we will emerge from this,
and there will be something that's better.
They'll be. Silver.
Lining solves bad things.
The millions of people around
the world who died because of
COVID the political violence.
We saw in in Washington DC on January 6th.
Hope is that leadership will emerge and and
that's how you make a fearful situation.
It is something that's that's good,
or at least the uh,
better than it was.
Such great, great words from Felix,
thanks to him for taking us on that
historic journey. We loved Felix.