The New Fear
THE NEW FEAR
by Brian Keene
(Portions of this essay appear in The New Fear: The Best of Hail Saten III)
Episode 1: Introduction
Earlier this week, a twenty-three year old college student named Cho Seung-Hui stalked the campus of Virginia Tech for three hours and slaughtered thirty-two of his fellow classmates.
Get used to it.
This is the era of the New Fear. Things will get worse. The center cannot hold.
When Shane Ryan Staley asked me to write a semi-regular column for the Delirium Insider, I was hesitant. I enjoy writing non-fiction, but between my two Blogs—Hail Saten and World Domination 101—and the various essays and articles I write for other publications, I wasn’t sure what I could contribute to the Insider. It needed to be different than the aforementioned content.
Finally, I decided to talk about fear. About monsters.
Not zombies or ghosts or werewolves. Those monsters are old school. In the era of the New Fear, the monsters fly airplanes into skyscrapers. They abduct children from their beds and bury them in the woods. They go on shooting rampages. They beat their wives while a crowd watches via webcam. They are all around us and there more of them with each passing year.
And they will be the focus of this column. I intend to pick up life’s rocks and show you what’s squirming underneath—bloated, blind, and full of dark venom.
A few words about this column’s title—The New Fear. This is also the title of my third collection of non-fiction, which is forthcoming from Delirium later this summer. Shane is worried that many of you will be confused by this, but Shane worries about many unimportant things. (Currently, he is also worried about the fact that I have recently obtained a case of dynamite and intend to bring some along on my next visit to his home). But I digress. This semi-regular column, The New Fear, should not be confused with my book, The New Fear: The Best of Hail Saten III.
They do, however, share the same sentiments.
Clear? Good. And if not, email Shane about it. He loves it when you guys do that.
To get us started, here is the original essay that first got me thinking about our bad world. I wrote it last summer and it will appear in The New Fear book. In light of this week’s events, I think it resonates even more.
Next time, we’ll take a look at Chechnya’s recent spate of baby farming.
Mankind is fucked.
* * *
THE NEW FEAR
Brian Keene
Last week, I told you about The New Fear.
This morning, a milk truck driver named Charles Carl Roberts IV walked into a one-room Amish schoolhouse about 30 minutes from my home and commenced to slaughter little girls. Roberts, 32, was married. He had three children. He walked his children to the bus stop, then returned home and left four suicide notes. They said that what he was about to do was an act of revenge for something that happened to him when he was twelve years old.
In reality, he intended to truss these young girls up, repeatedly rape and sodomize them, and then kill them all before killing himself.
Roberts lived in Nickel Mines (Bart Township). That’s also where the schoolhouse was. He drove up in a friend’s pickup truck. He walked inside armed with the following items: a 9 mm Springfield Arms semiautomatic pistol, a Browning Arms 12-gauge shotgun, a Ruger bolt-action 30.06 with ammo in a case, Black range bag with 600 rounds of ammunition, two cans of smokeless powder, a stun gun, two knives, a bucket, change of clothes, earplugs, a hammer, a hacksaw, pliers, wire, eyebolts, lumber, KY jelly, handcuffs, and both clear and duct tape.
Roberts made all of the male children leave. Then he barricaded the doors with the lumber. He lined up all of the female students, and bound their hands and behind them with wire. Authorities arrived on the scene before he could begin raping the children. He was in the process of stringing them up from eyebolts he’d put into the wall when he was interrupted. As the State Police arrived, he opened fire execution style. Not satisfied with just shooting the students, he then opened fire on the police.
When it was over, Roberts had shot eleven young female students, a teacher’s aide and himself. Four are confirmed dead at this hour. Most of the others are in critical condition.
The same thing happened last week at Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colorado. In fact, this is the third in less than two weeks.
This is the era of The New Fear. This is how it works. While the government is looking for brown people and building walls at the border to score last-minute election points, while the Muslims and the Christians and the Jews kill each other in the name of a God they all believe in, while a million people are slaughtered in Darfur and the nightly news chooses to ignore that and report instead on the two-headed spawn of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, while our men and women in the service of our country are butchered in a war that has lost all reasonable meaning or sense, while Democrats and Republicans urge you to root for them the way you do your favorite football team, while you stay asleep…the New Fear comes calling. It can be anyone. It can be anywhere.
And it will get worse. This is the era of The New Fear.
I was born in 1967. I graduated High School in 1985. Many of my readers (and the readers of this blog) fall into that generation.
This is our fault, because we are in charge now. The Baby Boomers are geriatric, a few years out of the nursing home. Our children are approaching high school and college. Our generation—the generation that never had a Vietnam or a World War Two or a Great Depression or a Kent State—the generation whose only strife was the cancellation of Family Ties and Kurt Cobain’s weak-ass suicide—is in charge of things now, and we are a generation of blind, bleating sheep. They kept us pacified our entire lives. Kept us fat and sated on Atari and Nintendo and Playstation, on The A-Team and Dukes of Hazzard and The Facts of Life, on MTV and VH1 and Pimp my fucking Ride, on collectible action figures for adults and a Starbucks on every corner. We have been conditioned not to care, not to notice. As long as we have television and video games, it doesn’t matter. We shake our heads and say how sad it all is, but we do nothing. On Sunday, we get passionate for our team and on Election Day, we do the same thing. We swallow whatever candy-coated celebrity news item the networks are paid to feed us and we never once dig into the facts and try to educate ourselves. We never think for ourselves. We never feel the walls become sand beneath our feet.
Because we are afraid. We are afraid of the illegal immigrant who will steal our jobs and our daughters. We are afraid of the pedophiles hiding around every corner. We are afraid that the liberals are winning. We are afraid that the conservatives are winning. We are afraid of the airplane over the city’s skyline and the foreign man in the winter coat on the subway platform. We cannot stop to help a bleeding stranger because they may have Aids. We cannot aid a friend in need, because they might have a lawyer. We cannot move, cannot think, cannot act, and cannot feel—unless we let someone else tell us how or do it for us.
But never mind all that. We are armed with PS3 and X-Box 360 and tickets to the Bears game. We have DSL and DSS and SUVs. And these things that are happening? They are happening somewhere else to someone else.
Until they happen to you.
That is how it works in the era of The New Fear.
When it knocks on your door, will the fear have paralyzed you into doing nothing? Or will your own stupidity and selfishness be the cause of your inaction? And thus, your demise?
Comment by kresby on 23 April 2007:
Yep - the politicians want us to be very afraid. Then they can manipulate us easier because we don’t use our minds and we are apathetic as hell. Well, THEY are any ways. I’m one of those people Brian identified as geriatric or old-as-hell. Well I agree that people need to wake up and take action against this fear mongering. I was somewhat an activist as a young adult. Don’t see that anymore. Why not? Get down Keene.
Comment by kresby on 23 April 2007:
Shane - this is really not confusing at all. What is confusing is how Keene can write the same article and use it over and over. Lazy bum. NOT!
kresby
Comment by Trev on 23 April 2007:
Nothing like riding on the coat-tails of a couple of tragedies to launch a new book. Bravo!
Comment by Scott Berke on 23 April 2007:
Brian Keene for President! You might not win, but maybe the message would get out.
Shane - no more confused about the title of the column than I am about everything else.
Comment by Tod Clark on 23 April 2007:
Real life horror is always more scary than fiction. The world we live in is certainly something to fear.
Comment by crimsongremlin on 23 April 2007:
Everything you mentioned is true but I feel the problem lies with the fact that people react instead of plan to prevent. All our laws and safety codes are developed because something happened as opposed to enacting something to prevent something tragic from happening in the first damn place. Also the laws and codes that are in existance are not even enforced when you have a registered, certified, guaranteed, proven idiot out there with the documentation to back it up. I whole heartedly agree that the system is f***ed. Now whether or not the problem lies with us individually or nationally, I wish I knew.
Comment by noigeloverlord on 26 April 2007:
People are taught to be offended to easily in this country!As soon as a Spree killing happens someone is saying the person was picked on called names thats what caused them to do it!
People are being fired because they call someone a name!I can forgive Him for calling Me a name but I need time to Heal!WTF ever happened to Sticks and Stones!I belive Cho was impassioned by the whole nappy headed hoe thing.Don’t get Me wrong I think He was planning this for a while but I bet You any amont of money that He felt He was right and Rev. Al Sharpeton was telling Him He should go out and do it now!(in his head of course)
Comment by AjaxLou on 28 April 2007:
The New Fear is an apt name. Fact is always stranger than fiction. Reality has never been so frakkin’ twisted as it is now.
Comment by Dale L. Murphy on 29 April 2007:
I am one of the people of Brian’s generation. It’s sad to think that our generation had so much potential and we have become blind to the things going on around. Just like Brian said we are too busy with our own lifes to worry about others for the reasons named. The New Fear is here to stay it would seem.
As always Brian a great great column