Fear vs. Knowledge: Which will prevail with sequestering?

          Fear is the nutrient of ignorance; and vise versa. A people who by deliberate negligence or unwitting apathy is starved of knowledgeable to the purpose and mechanisms of their government and society will fall prey to leaders who will feed them a diet of fear in order to fulfill their own interests rather than the real needs and concerns of the society.
         It is no wonder that Congresswoman Maxine Waters can publicly say that the sequestration due tomorrow will cause a catastrophic collapse of the Federal government with the loss of 170 MILLION federal employees' jobs.  There are, according to reports only 150 million federal employees throughout the entire United States. Maxine Waters needs to refresh her math skills. 
        However, it does signal a larger, more ominous problem. Maxine Waters constituents are ignorant. Not in a social way, mind you: but they either don't have decent math skills also, they are unaware of the facts, or they cannot read or don't care to read news.  Sure enough, Maxine Waters, who has been a representative in Congress for 20-plus years will be reelected.
        The situation is merely a symptom: Waters is not the problem.  We, the constituents, are.  Our own lack of knowledge is the well-spring for opportunistic leaders who are not only not following their constituents, they vacillate between dangling carrots and threatening poison if we don't follow their "lead". 
        Unfortunately there is no small shortage of such manipulations of the public.  One could argue the Founding Fathers also used fear to warn the people.  There is one difference between the use of fear then and the use of fear now. They lived through the warnings they disseminated. There has been a shift from warning to conjuring. The former based upon experience, the latter upon imagination. While each was intended to move the people to action; the action intended by each was vastly different in purpose.
       Today, we experience fear as a virtual world of literalness based upon the surreal of politicians aiming to fill empty minds with wilting flowers of rhetoric by bad math and bad logic. President Obama is claiming that the sequester will destroy budgets: Children will go off insurance;  severe loss of fire departments and police forces will leave us unprotected; education budgets, including Head Start will end; and a myriad of other vital functions will die with the sequester. But knowledge is king: A quick view of the graph of federal spending versus the sequestered reduction of it kills all fear of a collapsing government. Quite the contrary.
       On the other hand, is there a time when fear is valid and real--based upon knowledge? Certainly, this is the concern of the Founders and the impetus behind the framing of the Constitution with its multiplicity of intertwining checks and balances. I would argue that this is not fear, but repulsion.  Once one has put their hand on a hot burner, fear--the anxiety of the unknown--is replaced with wisdom by experience. Greater than experience are those who learn by that of another so to avoid repeating the offense. Their knowledge brought wisdom.  Thus, while the Founders warned of the ills of an illiterate and ambivalent society, it was not fear but wisdom that they disseminated. The graph above proves the point. It's knowledge does not invoke fear--but action to the gravity of our federal spending. This knowledge should, in the good conscious of every American provoke a sense of duty to speak out about the absurdity of our fiscal direction.  A call to Congressmen, Senators, and the President is in order.  Note-taking on who responds is imperative. Searching for future leaders armed with knowledge--not fear--is the outcome.
       Ezekiel Cullen, a leader of the Texas Republic, a Congressman and Supreme Court Justice in the 19th Century is remembered  and his words memorialized on the exterior facades of multiple buildings at the University of Houston. His convictions are written on one facade saying that a free people is a knowledgeable people. On another, "Intelligence is the only true aristocracy in a government like ours and the improved and educated mind has and will ever triumph over the ignorant uneducated mind."
        Indeed, ignorance feeds fear. But knowledge will continually prevent the captivity of ignorance that poor leaders hope for and great ones dissolve. The Americn public can appease shouts of doom that would have them in fearful nightsweats, by feasting at the banquet of easily acquired knowledge that provides wisdom rather than fear.