we were playing, me and mom and auntie and hilde and comet and a chain gang of toddlers came out of the playlot all tethered together in a long leash led by a woman with furrowed brow saying please take your dogs because we are afraid, making all her tied up kids afraid in a long attenuated knot and i thot, the worst thing you can do to a kid is put a leash on the leash and teach fear. especially wrong is a teacher who teaches fear of lovely and loving dogs. it's sick, really, to put that in children, to put your fear in them. because we are afraid, she says, and instantly the whole tethered entourage is afraid. the fastest teaching and the most lasting is fear. and this just makes my heart hurt, and this just makes me mad. a quick lesson in fear and control, a lost opportunity for engagement, learning, joy and love, overriding instinct and natural curiosity. 

teaching fear buries instinct alive. the kids are going to grow up in a constellation of fear anyway,  but they may as well be able to identify the stars. i think of star maps, those stars under the basement stairs that kept me looking up, the stars blotted out by light pollution. the invisible stars turned to fear. 
i grew up in this culture too, this culture of fear, i grew up in a constellation of cold fears. i know how fear isolates, incapacitates, and spreads. our monied rulers do too, telling us what and how and when to fear and how the price of freedom is war, we must strike at the heart of fear, of terror, we must annihilate fear, so that our children can grow up in freedom on leash fearing dogs.