The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [114]
There should be no mystery about where much of the money and labor can be found—in the culture of fear itself. We waste tens of billions of dollars and person-hours every year on largely mythical hazards like road rage, on prison cells occupied by people who pose little or no danger to others, on programs designed to protect young people from dangers that few of them ever face, on compensation for victims of metaphorical illnesses, and on technology to make airline travel—which is already safer than other means of transportation—safer still.
We can choose to redirect some of those funds to combat serious dangers that threaten large numbers of people. At election time we can choose candidates that proffer programs rather than scares.8
Or we can go on believing in martian invaders.
10
NEW FEARS FOR A NEW CENTURY
And Some Old Ones Updated
In the final chapter of this book’s first edition, I asked whether it would take an event comparable to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to shift Americans’ attention away from puffed-up dangers and onto very serious ones we have largely ignored. Not long after the book was published such an event occurred: the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001. In the aftermath of those attacks, what became of the dubious and overblown fears I discussed? How have they fared since 9/11?
In the short term, the response was heartening. In the weeks following the far-too-real horrors of that event, the counterfeit horrors that had occupied much of the popular media almost completely disappeared from public discourse. No longer were TV news programs and newsweeklies obsessed, as they had been just prior to the attacks, with dangers to swimmers from shark attacks and to Washington interns from philandering politicians. Gone were warnings about roller-coaster accidents and coyotes prowling suburban neighborhoods.
Nor did the latest incident of violence in a workplace or school make headlines and provoke pundits to decry the sorry state of America’s youth. Part of the reason for that change was clear: the loss of thousands of lives and the threat of more terrorism utterly overshadowed any such stories. Even producers at local TV news programs and cable news shows could not fail to understand that for some time, stories about bioterrorism, airport security, and hate crimes against Arab-Americans would hold more interest and importance for viewers than the usual fare.
But there was a more important and longer-lived reason that some of the old scare stories did not occupy the news media post-9/11: a powerful and pernicious narrative of the past few decades largely lost its usefulness for fear mongers in the news industry and for the politicians and pundits they quote—what I dubbed the “sick-society” narrative. In that narrative, the villains are domestic, heroes are hard to find, and the storyline is about the decline of American civilization. That narrative is incompatible with another that came to the fore after the terrorist attacks. The new narrative was about national unity, villains from foreign lands, and the greatness of American society. One result of this new narrative was a shift in the putative dangerousness of certain categories of people and behaviors.
The demise of the sick-society narrative augured especially well for one sector of the U.S. population. Young Americans in their late teens and twenties were portrayed in the media throughout the first decade of this century as heroes in the New York City Fire Department and in the military, or alternatively, as campaigners for world peace. It’s a striking departure from how this age group was characterized in the 1990s—as “seemingly depraved adolescent murderers,” “superpredators,” and teenaged single moms who “breed criminals faster than society can