Fearful Americans America\'s Misplaced Fears

Fearful Americans

America's Misplaced Fears

Why is it that Americans seem most afraid of things that happen rarely -- a lightening strike, a terrorist attack, a plane crash? In his article "Why Americans Fear the Wrong Things," Barry Glassner attempts to answer this questions. He argues that Americans are often afraid of the wrong things, supporting this evidence with a variety of examples. For instance, he argues that in instance when the unemployment rate is actually low, people fear loosing their jobs or they fear the economy. When crime rates are low, he argues that people fear crime, and actually consider crime rates to be much higher. A similar taboo exists with drugs. Glassner states that when drugs were hardly used by high schoolers -- in the late 1990s -- most people thought the drug problem was out of control. He also argues that people fear diseases like flesh-eating bacteria, when the probability of getting those diseases is slim to none. The author continues by listing numbers of people who think they have diseases; those numbers add up to more people than live in the United States.

These kinds of misplaced fears don't come cheap, Glassner argues. He states that one of the most obvious costs of misplaced fears is misplaced money -- funds poured into problems like drugs and child abuse that are not really as large a problem as poverty or other social conditions. In fact, Glassner argues that fear prompts massive amounts of spending on the police force and prisons each year when these kinds of investments are not really necessary. All this does is create more fear, and the illusion that there really is something scary out there. If not, why would we be investing our money in it.

So why do Americans fear the wrong things? Glassner narrows the answer down to two easy explanations. First, he argues that fear might be inspired by the date. Citing evidence such as the Salem witch trials and other panics, he argues that people have often launched into unexplainable panic around the change of the decade or the change of the millennium. What might cause this are wary expectations, a sense that new things are coming and a fear of the unknown. Of course, a fear of the unknown has been a part of many societies since the beginning of time. It was because of this that explorers were often afraid to go into uncharted waters and legends surrounding what lay at the end of the map were prominent. But Glassner argues that the fear of the wrong things can't be explained by the calendar alone. Instead, he argues that another explanation is the news media, which tends to fixate on disasters. He gives examples of news networks creating fear about incidents that actually happen very infrequently, such as Barbara Walters' creating a panic over fires on operating tables -- a rare incidence.