Gingrich Comments Demonstrate Impact of Fear

This video clip of an August 2007 comment by Newt Gingrich is filled with the word "fear" and its variants. Believing as I do that fear is the opposite of love, I found his comments revealing but perhaps not quite in the way he intended.

I am as disturbed by the atmosphere of fear being created by many of our national leaders, including Gingrich, as a way of keeping the people at large from seeing the larger truth: that war is not an answer but a mind-set, that terrorism is not an enemy but a tactic used by many different groups for many centuries and that you cannot, therefore win a battle against terrorism any more than you can win a war on crime or drugs or disease.

This is all old-way thinking and it has gotten us where we are. The way to peace and freedom and success is not down the road labeled "war". Einstein said no problem can be solved with the same mind-set that created it. We've got to find some new ways of thinking and reacting to this or we will destroy ourselves as a race.

I believe the current Administration is doing what it sincerely believes is the right thing to do to address the threat it sees as it understands that threat. I hold no ill will against them for it. But it is absolutely clear, at least to me, that their approach is not only not working, it cannot work. It will not work. And in the process of trying so hard to make it work, they've ripped some things in our national fabric, perhaps beyond repair.