What are you afraid of?

I’m reading Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear.

The book, which came out in 1999, has received lots of love from everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Michael Moore.

The book’s subtitle is “Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things.”

To tell the truth, I’m more skimming it, which is not really my style when it comes to non-fiction. I tend to absorb.

I’ll have a more comprehensive review when I finish it, but it occurred to me yesterday that I had walked nearly two miles downtown and then back home again with my face in this tome, alone, through Syracuse’s North Side on the way and through a deserted Franklin Square on the way home. This route is not uncommon for me.

Perhaps the media nerd in me is what makes me part of the target audience; I clearly am not one of those members of the population who’s worried that if I walk by lofts I’m more and more likely to get hit by a major appliance falling out of a window. Because, you know, instances of this are rising at 50% a year. Of course, that doesn’t say anything about the numbers – it’s not like it’s up to 75 million after happening 50 million times the year before. We’re talking up from two to three.

OK, so it’s not a statistic that’s in the book, but it is one of the points.

I’m not going to hit you with a lot of communication theory right here (I probably will in the review), but let’s just say that despite what you might believe, you are susceptible to mass media, and if someone says it in a tone you trust, you might take it for truth without analyzing it. (This goes for me, too, not just you.)

As you go through your week this week, I want you to think about some of these things:

» Do you routinely avoid neighborhoods when walking or driving?
» Do you avoid certain sidewalk situations?
» Where do you park your car when you go to the mall or the grocery store?
» What do you eat? Or, more importantly, what do you not eat?
» What destinations make you nervous? Why? Does that stop you from going?
» Overall, why do you do the things you do? Why don’t you do the things you avoid?