Fear’s Fortress in the Swamp
“The sad truth is that most evils are done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” – Hannah Arendt
I want to tell you a story. This one is called The Devouring Vine.
A gardener once noticed a strange vine growing near the far corner of his land. At first, it seemed harmless, thin stems, tiny leaves, no fruit worth picking, but it clung tightly to whatever it touched, wrapping itself around fence posts and bending them with its grip.
One morning, he saw the vine starting to coil itself around his crops. Fear rose in his chest. If this keeps spreading, he thought, it will ruin everything I’ve worked for.
He didn’t want to go through the trouble of pulling it out by the roots. That would take time, patience, and hard work. So he came up with another idea, direct the vine somewhere else, anywhere else, so it would grow away from his precious plants.
Just beyond his land stood a grove of wild trees. They weren’t his, and he didn’t care much for them. Birds nested there. Travelers sometimes rested under their shade. But to him, they were expendable.
So he built trellises, sturdy and tall, leading from his field straight into the grove. The vine followed the path he made, wrapping around the wild trees, pulling their branches down, and driving the birds away.
The gardener felt proud of himself. I’ve protected my own, he told his neighbors.
But the vine wasn’t satisfied. When the wild grove was stripped bare, it turned back toward the field. This time, it returned along the very trellises the gardener had built. It grew thicker, faster, hungrier. Soon it was choking the crops, climbing the walls of his home, and covering his windows until he could barely see the sun.
By the time he tried to stop it, the vine’s roots had spread so deeply into the soil that pulling it free meant tearing up his own land.
The lesson: When we allow fear and cruelty to take root, and we aim them toward others to keep ourselves “safe,” we forget that the same roots are buried in our own soil too. The paths we create for harm to reach others are the same ones it will use to reach us. This is how fear works, when it’s left unchecked, it never stays where we send it.
And if you want to see what those trellises look like in our time, you only need to look at the swamps of Florida.
No matter where we stand, when we dig deep enough, we reach the same center... let’s dig deeper.
“When fear is the architect, cruelty will always be the blueprint.”
They call it Alligator Alcatraz, a detention center planted in the middle of the Florida Everglades, a place already hard for life to survive. The swamp circles it like a moat. Dark waters ripple with alligators. The air buzzes with swarms of biting insects. The heat presses against the skin like a sentence. Steel fences and razor wire slice the horizon into cages.
Inside, the stories are grim, food that’s spoiled, water that’s unsafe to drink, lights blazing all night so rest never comes, air so heavy it chokes the lungs. People’s bodies shrink, their skin grows pale, their eyes lose the spark of hope.
But this is not really about the swamp, it’s about the inner swamp of human thinking, the murky waters of fear, pride, and suspicion that could imagine such a place and call it justice.
Fear of the stranger. Fear of difference. Fear of losing control over a world we never truly owned. Fear so old and unexamined it has forgotten the wound it came from. And when fear runs the mind, it will disguise itself as “protection” and “order.”
Fear can’t sit still. It must build something to shield itself from the dangers it imagines. And when fear builds, it never builds bridges... only walls. It closes gates instead of healing wounds. It labels people as problems to be solved instead of lives to be understood.
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” – H.P. Lovecraft
Fear rarely works alone.
Anger becomes its weapon, quick to lash out, sharp enough to wound not just the body but the worth of others. It seeks to silence, to shame, to push people into the margins where their voices can’t be heard.
Pride becomes its mask, polishing cruelty so it looks respectable. It dresses harm in moral language, quotes scripture to justify exclusion, waves flags to make it feel patriotic. Pride whispers, “This isn’t hatred, it’s principle. This isn’t cruelty, it’s order.”
Together, fear, anger, and pride form a perfect camouflage. Harm hides in plain sight, smiling as it strikes. Suffering gets rebranded as “necessary,” as though pain were a price worth paying for safety, as long as someone else is the one paying it.
And when this mindset becomes normal, it doesn’t just shape opinions, it builds places. Places designed not to heal, but to break.
“Pride is concerned with who is right. Humility is concerned with what is right.” – Ezra Taft Benson
Fear can be convincing. It can wear a suit and call itself a leader. It can stand behind a pulpit and call itself a shepherd. It can smile into a camera and call itself a patriot. And it will tell you it’s protecting what matters most, your safety, your values, your way of life.
But here’s the truth,
Fear protects nothing. It can’t. It only shrinks the circle of compassion until love has no space left to live. It convinces us that kindness is weakness and that empathy is dangerous. It whispers that safety depends on someone else’s suffering. And when we believe it, we build cages while swearing we are defending freedom.
A place like Alligator Alcatraz is not just a facility, it’s an x-ray of the soul. It lays bare what lies beneath the surface of our public image and national slogans. It shows the cracks in our shared character, the fault lines where compassion gives way to convenience, where principle bows to fear, where justice is reduced to punishment.
It reveals how small our vision becomes when we can’t imagine safety without force, when we see control as the only form of protection, and when our answer to difference is always distance. It shows how easily those who are religious, not righteous, can drift from their own sacred texts, forgetting the call to love the stranger, to welcome the outcast, to see the image of God in every human face.
And it reflects a society willing to trade the hard, slow labor of love for the quick, easy route of locking people away, a bargain that feels safe in the moment but leaves the soul in greater danger than it was before.
“He who opens a school door, closes a prison.” – Victor Hugo
The rebellion begins, Kindred, when we stop letting appearances fool us. When we recognize that fear dressed for Sunday service is still fear. That cruelty wrapped in moral language is still cruelty. That rules made from suspicion will never bring peace.
It begins when we stand without hate.
When we love without waiting for permission.
Standing without hate means holding your ground in truth and justice without letting resentment own your voice. It’s refusing to mock, dehumanize, or punish for the sake of revenge, even when you are speaking against cruelty.
Loving without permission means letting compassion lead before the crowd says it’s acceptable. It’s choosing to show kindness to the “otherized,” to help without deciding who deserves it, to forgive without waiting for an apology.
Because the real prison is not in the swamp, it’s in the mind that refuses to see the human in the “Other.”
And the way out is not force, it’s courage.
Courage to imagine safety without cages. Courage to lead with compassion when fear demands control. Courage to let love set the terms.
Gratitude.
