Culture of Fear

When I began reading Barry Glassner’s “Culture of Fear”, I thought “Finally somebody agrees with me!”. I have long thought that people are worriers. I first came to this realization when I was a child and began to want to go off and explore things on my own. My mother was constantly worrying about the silliest things I thought. I lived on 300 acres of land and loved to explore every acre of it. I would tell my mother I was going out in the woods to explore. And she would always worry about me getting ticks. “Who cares about ticks? You can just pull them off”, I’d say. “But lime disease!”, my mother would worry. She was so worried about lime disease from ticks. I wondered where this worry came from considering my mother had never known anyone who had actually gotten lime disease. She told me that she read a news article outlining the many dangers of lime disease.

I think the media plays a large part in contributing to people’s worries. My mother would have never known to worry about lime disease if she had not read it in a magazine. Don’t get me wrong, I think the media does a great job of keeping us informed and aware of what’s happening in the world. The media warns us about harmful sun rays. Without the all the news about skin cancer and the importance of sun screen many of us would not slather on some SPF before going out into the sun. The media keeps us from being ignorant about many important things and can help improve the quality of our lives. But sometimes I think the media can be too dramatic. It reminds me of a high school girl too afraid to leave the house because of a small blemish. When the media runs out of important stories it has to results to smaller stories. But the media is still an industry and has to make money. So these small stories are dramatized to get peoples interest and make them buy the paper or magazine. The result of all this over dramatization is a culture of fear.

Living in a culture of fear lead by an over dramatized media can start a terrible cycle of the cause and effect of news. When people are constantly bombarded with news stories about crime and illness they start to think that these things are common even though the actual statistics prove that they are not. Let’s take the case of restless leg syndrome. I had never had restless legs nor heard of restless leg syndrome. Then one evening I saw a commercial for it. That night while I laid in bed for some reason I remembered the commercial. And I started getting restless legs. I wrote the instance off to the fact that I had just seen the commercial and I have never had restless legs since. Sometimes the media can almost create a placebo effect on its viewers.
Fear and worrying can have many negative affects. I used to live with a girl that I will call Brandi. Brandi was the worst worrier that I have ever known. While we were living together and I got to know her she confided in me that she was having several health problems. She had migraines, back pains, and stomach aches regularly. She went to the doctor and it turns out that all her health problems were due to her high stress. She literally worried herself sick. People need to stop worrying so much and falling for all the media hype. Worrying can prove to be beneficial in some cases. Worrying about skin cancer will prompt you to wear sunscreen and thus decrease your chances of getting it. Worrying about things you can not prevent or help will only take up time and energy. In Brandi’s case, the actual act of worrying about bad things that could happen to her led to bad things happening to her.

So my advice today is to stop worrying so much. Pick your battles when it comes to fear and take the media with a grain of salt. Let’s not live in a culture of anxiety but in a culture of assurance and faith. The civilization we live in now is the most advanced of any other civilization in any time of place. Instead of worrying about what else could happen let’s start enjoying the milestones we have reached so far.

Not a luxury

I do not agree with Al Gore’s statement, “You know as well as I do that the Internet will never be a fixture in every home until parents have the tools they need to make it safe for their children's explorations.” He seems to think that the lack of the ability to block offensive content is what is preventing every household from having the internet. In the past twelve months an estimated 13.3 percent of the United States’ population was below the poverty level. (factfinder) A family is considered to be impoverished if their total income for the year is less than the threshold for that family. The threshold is determined by how much it costs to provide for the family in a year. (census) I think the main problem with getting every home in America online is not the lack of the appropriate filters or blocking software. I believe the main problem for this country is that more than one out of every ten families can not afford the internet in the first place.

Al Gore says that the internet is not a luxury but an essential tool for learning. I agree whole heartedly with that statement. The internet is a wonderful way to gain new knowledge about a wide variety of topics quickly. It is also a great way to connect with other individuals and to learn about many different viewpoints and ideas from others. The human population has been advancing exponentially in all areas and I believe that this is due to our ability to share and store knowledge. “The Internet allows our civilization to take a quantum leap forward, dramatically changing the way we relate to this rapidly growing amount of knowledge that's stored outside the brain and is accessible to people all over the world.” (Gore).

I think that the first step to helping the impoverished families of our nation is to provide them with the knowledge they need to go farther in life and make good decisions. The internet is where much information, media, and the exchange of ideas happens nowadays. The public sphere exists everywhere that the people can find to write, spread ideas, and share knowledge and opinions. I believe that the internet makes up a large part of the public sphere. Take our class for example, it is an online class. Without the internet this class would not even be taking place right now. Yes, I do believe that Al Gore has a noble cause with trying to make the internet safe for children. But I also believe that if he finds the internet so valuable that he should want to make the internet available to everyone so that everyone can benefit from it.


"M1701. Percent of People Below Poverty Level in the Past 12 Months (for Whom Poverty Status is Determined): 2006." U.S. Census Bureau. 27 June 2008 http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ThematicMapFramesetServlet?_bm=y&- geo_id=01000US&-tm_name=ACS_2006_EST_G00_M00601&- ds_name=ACS_2006_EST_G00_&-_MapEvent=displayBy&-_ dBy=040#?472,266.

"Poverty." U.S. Census Bureau. 28 Aug. 2007. 27 June 2008 .

Rude Awakening

When doing the readings for this week I was particularly drawn into Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. This is actually very unlike me. I usually get very bored reading things like this and have a hard time finishing them. When it comes to politics and current events, I am generally apathetic. Unlike most American citizens, I could not be found glued to my television post 9-11 waiting to hear the latest news from the White House. I never scoured the newspapers looking for any news about Al-Qaeda and thoughts of Anthrax never disturbed my sleep at night. I suppose this is because I have faith in our country (and the rest of the world). I have faith that people realize that technology has come a long way and that many countries have the ability to end every thing with a nuclear or even severe biological attach. I have a memory from my late elementary years of a conversation with my mom. My uncle was overseas fighting in the Gulf War at the time. I said to my mom, “I know we can win. All we have to do is drop a BIG bomb on them and then they lose. Why don‘t we just do that now and get it over with?” I was too young to understand the implications of such a thing and my mom had to explain it to me. She told me first that the USA was not the only country out there to have BIG bombs and that if we destroyed a country that there would be retaliation. She explained why a World War III had the potential to destroy our entire planet or at least set us back a century or two. Then she explained the toll this kind of thing would have on the environment. After this explanation I realized that my earlier suggestion was a horrible idea and that while we had the technology to create such devastation that it was wiser not to use it. I thought, “If a child can come to this conclusion, then surely adults already knew this and would never use these horrible weapons.”

When news of the Anthrax attacks broke out I was still not worried. I had faith in the world. Letting loose a biological weapon might be very effective at hurting your enemies but when any biological weapon is released it puts the whole world at risk. The earth is very connected and international travel happens everyday. Lets say that Al-Qaeda infected the USA with some kind of biological weapon. All it would take would be for one person to come in contact with the weapon and bring it overseas for Al-Qaeda’s own country to become infected. There is no way that anyone would be so stupid as to put the entire world at risk, I thought. So I never paid attention to any of the Anthrax news. I thought that the media and the public was making a big deal out of nothing. People even started making Anthrax jokes and that’s when I knew the whole thing had never been a big deal.

Then I read an a chapter from A Journal of the Plague Year and I realized how naïve I was. I realized that Anthrax did indeed make it into this country and could have caused many deaths here. While I had heard about the Anthrax scare from many people I never really grasped the full effect of it until now. What a rude awakening. Reading this exert really made me understand the importance of the public sphere. Without the public sphere then I would never have the opportunity to hear of the experiences and events that Daniel Defoe wrote about. Sometimes you have to envision yourself in a certain place and time to fully grasp the importance of the events that transpired there.

Making a Change

The section, " Digging Up the Land Mines," in Soul of a Citizen, in which David Lewis transforms himself from one of the lost boys to a well-adjusted functioning portion of society comforted me. His life seemed like a maze at first in which he kept retracing steps which led him back to the same dead ends; fortunately, he ended up almost transforming that maze into a labyrinth in which he found his end point, fulfilling his destiny through his own transgressions as a degenerate and remodeling himself and others as well as the place they called home. What strikes me most is that not even the standard, degree-holding person is able to actually reach that point of being able to say, "This is what I was meant to do." Call me cynical, but most people do what they have to only to get by. David Lewis inspires as he literally dragged himself out from under a bridge and used his own life lessons as a springboard for a different high.

On the weekends you're getting high," David explains. "You've
got your money, your drugs, maybe a girl. Then it's Monday, your
money's gone. You have to start all over, broke and hurting. That's
why all the blues songs talk about 'Stormy Monday' and 'Blue
Monday.' You have to steal to get what you need. That's when
you feel desperate and people kill each other. (146)

This quote from the article shows you just how realistic you have to be when creating change. I mean, who better to "dig up the land mines" than the man who planted them? You wouldn't want someone teaching who had not been taught themselves. And furthermore, someone who can actually relate to the addicts and thugs as someone actually having been there years before has a better chance of implementing a desire for change because he's able to actually show them that there is a better life out there.

Taking your own story and being able to place it in the hands of others so that it betters them isn't easy. Empathy isn't easy to push upon people, but relating to others around you and inspiring those not able to place themselves in your shoes, thats where it starts.