Becoming the Ocean ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
October 18, 2026
When I was a child, I just loved playing on a seesaw whenever I went to a playground. That sense of shooting up into the sky, and then rapidly returning to earth, over and over, sometimes greatly daring to go as high as I could so that when I descended I would bump onto the ground and bounce sharply up again.
I was thinking about seesaws recently, as I was reading about the importance of fulcrums. A fulcrum, of course, is the short piece of wood or metal in the exact center of the seesaw, that gives it all its power, its ability to move. Without a fulcrum for the long flat section of a seesaw to balance on, there would just be a plank on the ground. There would be no motion, no power. That center point, the fulcrum on which the plank balances, provides the power.
What led me to remember playing on seesaws was an essay I read recently by activist and organizer Scot Nakagawa, which was titled, “Fear is the Fulcrum.” (https://antiauthoritarianplaybook.substack.com/p/fear-is-the-fulcrum)
Mr. Nakagawa was writing about the rise of authoritarianism, not just here in the United States, but in a number of locations around the world, and what might be at the heart of this movement. He believes that it is being driven by fear.
He makes a very important point. Let’s go back to the seesaw for a second, and picture one in your mind. The part that provides the power, the ability to set people in motion, is the much smaller part of the apparatus. As I said a moment ago, the larger piece isn’t worth much with the smaller fulcrum. And so, wrote Scot Nakagawa, if fear is the fulcrum of authoritarianism, it doesn’t have to be a very large segment of society. It can provide the power used by authoritarians to force society to comply with its will.
Years ago, learning about Nazi Germany, it was always the mention of the Gestapo that would create a chill in the room. They were the elite, the secret police; the ones everyone was most afraid of. And yet, at its peak, in 1944, there were roughly 32,000 Gestapo agents in Germany. 32,000, out of a population of somewhere around 70 million people. And they created the fear needed to exercise tremendous control over the entire country.
Today, of course, we have ICE agents – Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They have been allowed to act in ways that create terror among immigrant communities and among innocent bystanders, and that is exactly why they behave the way they do, outside the laws and the norms of our civil society – pulling people out of cars at traffic stops, murdering people, grabbing people out of their workplaces and not letting distraught family members know where they have been taken. And there have been stories of intimidation; of ICE agents approaching trained observers – ICE Watch members, to tell them that they are being watched, that maybe they’ll be next. There is no purpose to any this except to create fear.
But, as was the case with the German Gestapo, ICE agents represent a tiny percentage of the population of the United States. The most recent number of ICE agents that I could find stands at around 29,000. If you add that number together with the agents of Customs and Border Patrol, there are slightly under 100,000 agents in a country with a population of over 340 million people.
The fulcrum of fear, although genuinely frightening, is very, very small. Now of course, it’s effective! Fear is a completely reasonable and logical response to seeing ordinary people’s lives destroyed as they try to go about their days: driving to work, picking up children at school. And fear can be contagious; in fact, the people trying so hard to instill fear in us are working hard to spread the contagion so that we will do their work for them. They try to make us afraid of our neighbors, telling us that they are criminals and dangerous. Listen to the words of the president of the United States at a campaign rally yesterday: “Does anyone think those murderers would be very nice people, nice, gentle, people, as your next door neighbor? No, they’ll kill you.” (quoted in It’s a Lovely Life, by Heather Delaney Reese)
Next those who crave power try to manipulate us to spy on one another, to stop trusting each other, and then to turn each other in. In these ways they spread fear, and a small number of people can gain control over a society.
What we have seen, especially in the past decade, is that many Americans are afraid of many things. They are afraid of people who do not look like them or talk like them. They are afraid of emerging gender identities, of the changing roles of so many marginalized people in our society: of minorities and women, of trans people. Ultimately, what this means is that many Americans are terrified of losing status and power: the power that they have felt entitled to for centuries, that they begin to feel slipping away. They imagine themselves and their way of life, and their power, being subsumed into something new and different, and that they will lose their power and their identity. In other words, they are like the river in the poem we heard a moment ago:
The river that “sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.” (Kahlil Gibran, Fear)
Those who fear being swept away, of losing themselves in the ocean, don’t see themselves as part of something greater. They are focused on their own identity, on their own social location, and on how social change affects them personally. They are not thinking about society as a whole.
Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher and historian, wrote a masterful book called The Origins of Totalitarianism not long after the end of World War II, in 1951. In it, she wrote this: “Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other… Therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about. Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result.” (as quoted in The Marginalian, by Maria Popova, https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/12/20/hannah-arendt-origins-of-totalitarianism-loneliness-isolation/)
To succeed in coming to power, an authoritarian or totalitarian regime must keep people apart. A regime achieves this by making people afraid of each other; afraid to trust, afraid of their differences. People must be kept afraid of the ocean of humanity that shares this miracle of a planet.
This month, we have been talking a lot about courage: about ordinary courage that’s not heroic; that might be unseen; that is our human response to the challenges of our daily lives. This kind of courage often goes unrecognized. And we shared stories, last Sunday, about this kind of courage, about times in our lives when we were called to step forward, and respond to difficult times, to say ‘yes’ to life.
Yesterday, all across the country, we saw yet another form of courage: public courage, the kind of courage that emerges when people choose to come together, and raise their voices to demand a different kind of life. Of course, I am speaking about the No Kings rallies held all across the country, over 3,000 separate events. A number of you attended, with your signs and your new bright yellow church T shirts, and most importantly, your commitment to our country and our democracy.
The question, of course, is always this: are we really accomplishing anything when we gather in rallies large and small across the country? Many well-meaning people would argue that we do not. Since the beginning of the current regime here in the United States, I have been arguing that indeed we are accomplishing a great deal. Now, perhaps we are not striking fear in the hearts of the regime, as they focus on their own greed and corruption, and on their increasingly desperate attempts to keep their hold on power and keep their sources of obscene wealth from slipping away.
But we create something very powerful when we show up in force, and that is community. We talk to each other. We bump into neighbors we haven’t seen in awhile. We realize that there are far more of us – the people who want a return to a commitment to civil rights and voting rights and basic trust in the competence of our government. And at the same time, we reduce the isolation that the regime is counting on to keep us submissive and manageable. The more of us who show up, the more courageous we feel. I didn’t walk down to the Boulevard yesterday to try to frighten the president. I headed over there to see you, to stand with you, to lend my voice and my presence so that we could all be courageous together. Love is present in those moments, as we struggle to keep signs from being blown away by the wind. And we believe that love, as expressed in community gatherings, is what will protect us from fear.
In the story about the emperor’s new clothes, each individual that encountered the emperor was too afraid to speak the truth; that there were no new clothes. It wasn’t until a crowd had gathered and one child’s voice was heard by many people that suddenly everyone could see what was true. It took the strength of the community to hold the truth.
My friends, fear is powerful, and it is contagious. It would be foolish to claim otherwise. We only have to picture a seesaw in our minds to understand that a small piece of equipment, that fulcrum, can create the power needed to make the seesaw work. And those people in the world who crave power, and crave everything covered with gold, and who reject human rights for others, rely on small fulcrums in order to build fear, to spread fear.
But we know that courage is contagious as well. We know that there are far more of us resting on the small fulcrum, all of us who still know what’s right, and who believe that together we can accomplish more than we ever can alone. And when we come together we feel our strength, and our power, and our love, and no longer fear approaching the ocean. As our poet wrote:
“The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.”
May we all know the joy, and the love, and the power, of becoming the ocean.
