A few weeks ago, Salon published an interview with an author, Lenore Skenazy, who — horrors! — let her then-nine-year-old son take the subway line, alone, that runs by their safe-as-houses home in a safe-as-houses part of New York City: Thirty years ago, this wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows, but now — even though there’s actually less violent crime now than there was thirty years ago — she was held up as The Evil Mommy.
The discussion over her heresy became a departure point for discussions of the culture of irrational fears that seem to have America in a death grip: We freak out over possible ’stranger danger’ to our kids when 86% of all killings and 70% to 90% of all sexual molestations of children are done by persons known to the victims. We’re being told to fear allowing the wretches held without trial or even charges at Guantanamo to be put in super-secure "Supermax" facilities on American soil, while at the same time we’re told to shrug our shoulders when women are "inexplicably" killed by men who it turns out were stalking them, or when yet another death is added to the 30,000 per year that are killed in the US by firearms.
When will we learn to fear the right things?
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Irrational fears driving public policy. Whoever could have anticipated…?
DEATH BY FIREARMS includes all suicides where a gun is used, Ms. Less-than-critical-thinker Phoenix Woman.
Gun crimes involving death (minus the suicides) are largely a function of gangs and inner cities and cleaning up both is a function of better education and child care and reduction of poverty.
I don’t know, PW.. According to advertisements I need to fear i don’t have a manly force flow when in the outhouse; which only a new pill can cure.
What do you expect for a people that grew up on “duck and cover”.
Gun crimes involving death (minus the suicides) are largely a function of gangs and inner cities and cleaning up both is a function of better education and child care and reduction of poverty.
yup – works for me. That’s why I always carry a copy of The Shock Doctrine and Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side whenever I’m an a rough neighborhood.
Jeez, I can’t even begin to tell you how many times good literary conversation interspersed with political discourse has saved my ass.
Ride the NYC subways much, do you?
Having spent the better part of my life there, I am not at all uncomfortable saying I wouldn’t put my 9 year old on a subway there alone. And having spent the better part of my life there, I think I’m pretty gutsy compared to a lot of my friends around the country in where I’m willing to go, at what time, and with whom. But a 9 year old is not an adult, and I don’t think those who look with disapproval at this bold experiment in fearlessness should be relegated to the paranoid funny farm.
Irrational fears haunt the United States more than they do other nations (not that anyone is immune). No one even laughed when it was proposed that Iraq could attack the United States prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Even if they could have teleported the entire Iraqi army into Kansas (which seems unlikely) and the regular U.S. military was all out of the country at the time I doubt the Iraqis would have gotten much further than Arkansas or Nebraska against the armed camp that is America.
A thoroughly effective defense-oriented defense of the United States would not require much more than 10 or 20% of present U.S. military expenditures.
Since you asked nicely:
I’m pretty sure we can never, in our lifetimes anyway, do anything more than HOPE we evolve into something that can better perceive between actual vrs. imaginary fears.
I am not a psychologist, but I slept in a motel somewhere, sometime ago, and while I was on their free internet wi-fi I read a lot of stuff on the origins of thought and mind, watched a couple classes in Paul Bloom’s Introduction to Psychology (on the Yale Channel) and finished off with a bit of Daniel Dennett.
Conclusion reached: So much of what we react to is totally outside the consciousness we are aware of that we’re hopelessly ill equipped to deal with it in a reality based way. And this all presupposes that the messages we’re being asked to digest aren’t scientifically ‘adjusted’ to make it through our already porous critical defenses.
For starters, I find the idea of H.A.A.D. to be fascinating. That’s Hyper Alert Agency Detection and in my understanding relates to our evolution in context (among other things) with predator avoidance. In short, you often mistake a shadow for a person, but never a person for a shadow. If you mistake a big rock for a bear there’s no harm and no foul. If you do the converse you aren’t around long to raise more of your kin. Turns out there’s a whole plethora of this kind of crap hardwired into our brains from our evolutionary past.
Enjoy.
My son started riding the NYC subway alone at age 10. That was 17 years ago.
Last week at an Optimist meeting, (a service club) one of the members asked me why Obamama was “obsessed” with closing Guantanamo. My first response was are you sure that ‘obsessed’ is the word you want? Then I said that the purpose of Guantanamo was to was to provide a place that we could pretend was outside the rule of law. When that elicited a blank stare (he used to teach math), I said “When did the “Home of the Brave” become a nation of cowards?” It may be the fact that I’m 6′6″ and close to 300 pounds, but I’ve never been afraid of anyone, despite the fact that I’m a DFH.
Several years ago, I borrowed a random audio book from the library. It turned out to be a book about how to perceive the difference between real danger vs. imagined danger, and how to be alert to the former and live to minimize it. (You can’t do that if every little thing frightens you, your HAAD.) The author was someone who ran a body guard service for famous people, like actors, iirc. I don’t remember much of the book anymore, but for one piece of practical advice: don’t watch the local news. If you do that you are asking to acquire HAAD, and that prohits the rational handling of actual dangers.
I’m 5′3″ (weight unavailable) dumpy woman in my 60s, and the only entity I’m afraid of is the govt.
Makes sense to me. How do we turn that around?
P.S. I was in Manhattan, where I live, on 9/11. I wasn’t frightened then (awestruck and all the other emotions that accompany a tragedy, but not afraid for my life). I subsequently discovered that many people I spoke with who don’t live anywhere near a target rich zone, were much more frightened of terrorism than I was. Up until W started all his wars, there had only been about 20,000 people killed by terrorism on the entire globe in the prior 30+ years.
Isn’t that what we’re trying to do here?
God, I hope so!
Cindy Sheehan keeps on speaking truth to power about war…
http://www.truthout.org/052509A?n
Our nation needs more Cindy Sheehans.
I wanted to go and help, but I didn’t know how. (I have vacation to burn most years.) I donated blood the next day. (I was already scheduled.) I can’t anymore because i spent too much time in Great Britain since 1980.
I don’t like spiders and snakes.
We must be afraid at all times. In fact, the swine flu is killing 100,000,000 a day!
Oh wait. Only 12 in the US have died from this kind of flu so far…
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7015267003
…and we haven’t even reached the typical 33,000 Americans killed each year from the flu yet! *sigh* But be afraid! The Swine Bug is coming!
There wasn’t anything for volunteers without a special skill to do in Manhattan. I waited in line to give blood, but they wouldn’t take it because I didn’t have a picture ID with me. By the next day they were announcing that they had more than enough blood. Volunteers with skills flooded in from all over the country. I think the ambulance I saw from the farthest away was from the mid-west. It was pretty amazing.
I’m off. BBL.
That’s pretty subjective don’t you think? People here are always going on about what scares them.
We had Red Cross and psychiatrists from here (Marshalltowm, Iowa) leaving the next day. I know I couldn’t have done anything. I just wanted to help.
I’m not sure that advice should be limited to local news. I don’t watch cable news at home, but I often see the afternoon “breaking news” stories on MSNBC, and I can’t say that I see any credible analysis of real danger in their handling of H1N1, or the child killing or kidnapping du jour, or much of anything else. Children and the credulous could get a very wrong sense of the real threat to them from a steady diet of such presentation.
I let my older son, then age 10, walk downtown to the library. He got turned around coming home, and asked a policeman for directions to the bridge. He knew where to go from there.
But they insisted on bringing him home in a police car, which he thought was great fun. People where I worked were most disapproving.
He is in his 20s now and has a highly developed “Spidey Sense” which has kept him out of trouble.
Of course, I’m older than dirt, but I used to walk to and from elementary school (starting in kindergarten), about 3/4 of a mile, in the city of St. Louis. They didn’t have school buses in the city- you either walked or took a city bus. Everyone did it, and nobody thought anything of it. I started babysitting my own younger brothers, and the neighbor kids, including infants, when I was twelve. I know people today who are afraid to leave their twelve-year-olds home alone for an hour. Different times, different fears. I do think that the ubiquitous, constant saturation of the news cycle helps to encourage the fear.
“When will we learn to fear the right things?”
When we take back the airwaves from the corporate fear merchants.
We always let our girls make their own decisions. We always treated them as adults in the making.
Did we worry? Yes. Did we lose sleep? Yes.
But we tried to teach them responsibility that they would only learn on their own the same way we learned.
You can only do so much and then you have to let go. We let go very early with strings attached.
Now we are very proud of them and our grandchildren.
Sounds like Gavin de Becker’s “The Gift of Fear”
Awesome book
He is a security consultant for Oprah amd Steve Jobs and others…..there are some amazing tips in the book, I highly recommend it….
so listen to children about hunger and books they would like to have
then provide them with food & books
We had Gitmo long before the torture stuff, so that guy makes a good point. If you’re not so well informed about what’s going on there it doesn’t seem important.
Just tell ‘em Gitmo has become a rallying cry for the terrorists and we can’t let them use that to recruit more fanatics into the fight against us.
Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah…Hallelujah…Halleeeelujaaaaaah!
Best post I’ve seen this entire millennium.
Why is it that the 80% Civil Liberty Supporters (all except the 2nd and 10th amendments) are so quick to point out how awful it is that so many sheeple are SO AFRAID of all the wrong things and YET they go right on to try to rattle the fake plastic skeleton of “OMYGOD! GUN VIOLENCE! EVERYONE IS GOING TO GET SHOT!!!1″
I believe in all 10 amendments.
I believe in a world where Law trumps government expediency.
I believe I have nothing to fear. I pity those who think they do.
Exactly.
How many people die of gun deaths versus, say, swine flu in a given year?
If we are going to have guns in our society, shouldn’t we at least try to set it up so that the people who have them can be trusted with them? We at least try to do that with cars.