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.