The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [131]
Still, none of those disturbing states of affairs cancels out the fact that an anti-fear candidate won the White House. Very early in that race, in August 2007, several months before even the Democratic primaries began, the would-be president’s wife, Michelle Obama, spoke to supporters in rural Iowa about why she agreed to let her husband run. “Barack and I talked long and hard about this decision. This wasn’t an easy decision for us,” she explained, “because we’ve got two beautiful little girls and we have a wonderful life and everything was going fine, and there would have been nothing that would have been more disruptive than a decision to run for president of the United States.
“And as more people talked to us about it, the question came up again and again, what people were most concerned about. They were afraid. It was fear. Fear again, raising its ugly head in one of the most important decisions that we would make. Fear of everything. Fear that we might lose. Fear that he might get hurt. Fear that this might get ugly. Fear that it would hurt our family. Fear.
“You know the reason why I said ‘Yes’? Because I am tired of being afraid. I am tired of living in a country where every decision that we have made over the last ten years wasn’t for something, but it was because people told us we had to fear something. We had to fear people who looked different from us, fear people who believed in things that were different from us, fear one another right here in our own backyards. I am so tired of fear, and I don’t want my girls to live in a country, in a world, based on fear.”
May her words reverberate well into the future.
NOTES
Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary Edition
1 Rick Ginsberg and Leif Frederick Lyche, “The Culture of Fear and the Politics of Education,” Educational Policy, 22, no. 1 (January 2008): 10-27; Kerri Augusto, “The (Play) Dating Game: Our Culture of Fear Means that We Can No Longer Count On Spontaneity to Bring Children Together,” Newsweek, 8 September 2008, p. 19. Discussion of both the concept and the book has been vigorous in the blogosphere, with bloggers offering their own interpretations of discussions in the chapters that follow, and finding echoes of my argument in movies and literature. My favorite example is an entry on a film discussion website in 2009 that quoted from Frank Capra’s 1938 classic, You Can’t Take It With You. A character in the film “sounds like she’s been cribbing from Barry Glassner’s TheCulture of Fear, [though] she is actually speaking to her fiancé over four decades before Glassner’s book was written,” the blogger remarks. He quotes a scene in which a character relays her grandfather’s view that “most people these days are run by fear—fear of what they eat, fear of what they drink, fear of their jobs, their future, fear of their health.” The blame, the character suggests, lies with “people who commercialize on fear. You know they scare you to death so they can sell you something you don’t need.” http://1morefilmblog.com/wordpress/you-cant-take-it-with-you-capra-1938/.
2 Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Terrorized by ‘War on Terror,’” Washington Post, 25 March 2007.
3 Brzezinski, “Terrorized.”
4 “Chubb Personal Insurance: Masterpiece Family Protection,” http://www.chubb.com/personal/family_protection.jsp; Robert J. Flores, “National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children,” U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, October 2002, pp. 2, 11, http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffilesl/ojjdp/196467.pdf.
5 Charles Piller and Lee Romney, “State Pays Millions for