My fear of fear politics

The day before the election, I took a break from calling folks in Virginia and Ohio for Sen. Obama to get my haircut. At 42, it takes a really creative barber to make it actually seem like work, but I feel terrible when what little hair I have gets shaggy.

I went to a Hair Cuttery in the suburbs of Chicago wearing an "Obama '08" sweatshirt. I sat down in the chair and listened as my stylist, Kara, told me that Obama was a Muslim, and that she wasn't even sure he was an American citizen because no one has seen his birth certificate.

She told me that she listens to Fox News each morning. "It's like my alarm clock," she said.

Looking for common ground, we both agreed that we would be happy when the election was over because we were tired of all of the smear ads on the radio and TV.

The thing that surprised me was when we started talking about the economy. Now I don't have any independent varification of Kara's story, but this is what she told me:

"We're one of those family's that shouldn't have gotten a loan. My husband's dad died and left us $100,000. So we had $50,000 for a down payment. The mortgage company said, 'Great. Here's a house' and never even looked at whether we could afford the payments.

"We've been doing everything we can to keep up the payments," she told me. "We're behind on all our credit cards and now (DuPage) County is going to take the house if we don't come up with $4,000 for the property taxes. We tried to get the mortgage company to escrow the taxes, but they said, 'We'd need you to give us $4,000 to do that.' If we had the four thousand, we would pay the taxes with it. The county is gonna foreclose for the taxes."

She told me that her husband got hurt and missed two months of work, but since he was new to the job, they let him go rather than pay workers comp. Kara's family doesn't have health care, and she worries that if they lose the house the kids will "have to go to a school near my mom's, (which) is filled with gang bangers and drugs."

I told her about the Mr. Obama's health care proposals. We talked about the bailout and the fallout of the market crisis. I expressed my belief that an Obama presidency would help working folks more than a McCain presidency would, but Kara insisted that she was too scared of Obama's "terrorism" to vote for him.

She's been fed a steady diet of fear and cannot see past it to recognize that it is in her own interest to vote for Democrats because "they hate America." FDR was right about fearing fear. It is the fear of terror that makes it such an affective tool.

For Kara and the millions like her who are afraid, let's hope that tomorrow's dawn brings with it hope for the country and the world.