PSYCHOLOGY II: FEAR

PSYCHOLOGY II: FEAR
REDMOND QUINN
What is your deepest fear, class?

When I was a child it was the dentist. Once I was seated in the waiting area – I must have been about 7 or 8 – and I heard this loud drilling sound followed by this gut-wrenching yell. I ran out of the building and if it wasn’t for a kind stranger putting an arm out, I would have walked straight into the main road.

As a child it’s always something like this that haunts people. I think to me it was the idea that I could not control the outcome of the visit to the dentists. If the grown-up with the drill wanted to pluck the teeth from my gums one by one, I would just have to sit back and let him take what he wanted.

When I was kidnapped, beaten and tortured by Wolfgang it took me back to that same place. I was a child again with a tunnel vision that only allowed me to see the outcome Wolfgang impressed upon me. He had me strapped to that dentist’s chair and had the pliers poised perfectly about an inch above my incisors. It was only a shot of Adrenalin from Luther that reminded me I had outgrown that youthful terror.

You see, fear comes from hatred. And when I was a child, I hated the dentist because he wasn’t real to me. He was the dragon at the end of a fantasy novel, or the big boss at the end of a video game. But when I became a man, I saw that he was just another man trying to do his job. How could I hate that? He was just like me.

Hatred comes from fear, and that’s why I pity Wolfgang.

He has this irrational hatred of people like me. A hatred so deep that he is willing to murder to preserve his sacred Aryan bloodlines. A hatred so deep that he deprived me of my basic human rights for weeks, toying with me like I was a mongrel.

But it isn’t really hatred, although it acts like it. It is fear. He fears black men because they look different to him. They speak differently to him. They have different customs to him. He has that same tunnel vision that I once had, and it stops him from opening his mind to the truth.

The dentist was a man just like me, and when I grew up, I understood that he wasn’t the monster I once thought. It is time Wolfgang grew up and grew out of his prejudices. He surely now, more than ever, must see that I am not the dragon at the end of the fantasy novel, waiting to be slain. I am just a man, like him, trying to do his job.

There is no need to fear me, Wolfgang, for we are both human. And there will be no need to hate me, once that fear has subsided.

Hatred has no place in my Revolution.