http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/why-were-living-in-the-age-of-fear-w443554
How is it that we are afraid when we are living in one of the safest times in human history and in the safest part of the globe? Why are we “making strange?”
COPLAC Digital Humanities
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/why-were-living-in-the-age-of-fear-w443554
How is it that we are afraid when we are living in one of the safest times in human history and in the safest part of the globe? Why are we “making strange?”
while reading this article and seeing “there’s a lot of power and money available to individuals and organizations who can perpetuate these fears,” combined with the idea of America being the safest it’s ever been, I can only think about how America is not only the safest, but also the most diverse it’s ever been. Now more than ever, America is embracing minorities: Muslim people, LGBT+ individuals, and African American people are integrated into the American mainstream, with one telling consequence: the Other is closer to “us” than it has ever been. Reading this, I thought about my mother, who grew up in a devout Christian environment with highly conservative moral and sexual values, but who has had two queer children embrace highly liberal lifestyles and then come out to her. For my mother, the Otherness of the LGBT+ community was suddenly within her own home, and there was, and still is, trepidation and uncertainty about who and what we Others are. I also think of my neighbor, who had a Muslim family move in next to her. Her trepidation at the foreign suddenly invading her safe space caused her to get information from news outlets which matched her own uncertainty and then use that info to tell everyone around her she had terrorists in her neighborhood. Pre-Information Age America was a homogeneous mix with an easily identified mainstream and Other, but in our age of technological enlightenment we are no longer able to keep the Other at a distance, which fills both the targeted Others and mainstream America with the fear frenzy so prominent in politics and the media today.
I believe a big part of the fear being spread is the assistance it gives to the idea started in the mid-century era of prosperity that poverty is a morality issue (which is totally untrue). Those who are poor got there because they have some kind of moral flaw. The propaganda promoting fear is also allowing people to maintain that they are ‘temporarily poor’, that they don’t have a moral deficiency, but that it is the ‘foreigners’ fault, and that if they would just go away, people would have more than ample opportunity to become rich. Thus, political leaders exploit the already somewhat instinctual fear of Others to promote the idea and claim that only they can rid the world of the Others and make everything hunky dorey again. Enter the media, which makes the exploitation of fear so much faster, easier and cheaper.
Bang bang, I agree! Not only can we stoke the flames of the unknown to perpetuate the ends of Big Brother and his cronies, but they’re self-fulfilling prophecies. The American South has been ingrained in Republican ideology and has seen no end to hardship since the end of the civil war. Once the Other is attached to a concept(War on Drugs, War on Terrorism, etc.) that people are completely disinterested in or disassociated with, you can perpetuate it generationally; making it harder and harder to rectify and stop, like a positive feedback loop.