No Fear

By Marvin H. Smith

The beauty of a typewriter is that there is no going back. Like recording with tape, once you put something down, it’s hard to correct. That doesn’t mean you don’t have to fix what you put down, you can always do that with a fine point pen. You can cross out phrases, add words, cut out words, or rewrite a whole damn paragraph. If you’re poor at spelling, like me, this is where the dictionary comes in handy. You can check all the words you screwed up on like “serandipodus”. A fine point pen is nice for these kinds of things. You say what you wanna say, even if it is screwed up, and you fix it after. Thinking about if our world worked the same way, we’d all be fools. No matter how smart you are, you’d be the same as anyone else who had a fine point pen. However, as we know, that’s not how the world works. In fact, people say things they don’t mean to say, but think it’s what they wanna say, and have to deal with the consequences later. Thinking about the quip “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission”, presupposes that we have a forgiving world. While that can be true to some extent, should everyone’s qualities lie in the risk of looking for relief in forgiveness? The truth is taught to be valued, but the one who cheats is the one who becomes successful in that moment. Is a person who cheats
and asks for forgiveness later a quality individual? The answers to these questions lie in our fears. It is the short term stability that a false action provides that makes it attractive to us. With how terrifying the world is, you can see why people would do such things in order to secure themselves. Our fears of the world shape us so that we can accommodate to it, and less to ourselves. Now we have a world that moves us by fear, creating false perceptions of ourselves. The world rotates on an axis of delusions, and expects much from people who can’t find their
place in it. To be truthful is to be used, and to be yourself is feared by others. It seems that in order to be a quality person, we must make our words and actions mean exactly what we want them to mean. No longer be afraid of permanency, no longer be afraid of the world’s definitions, and no longer be afraid of ourselves. No hiding, no cheating, no fear.