Fear: Is It Our Surroundings We Fear or the Unpredictability of Them?

"Watch enough brutality on TV and you come to believe you are living in a cruel and gloomy world in which you feel vulnerable and insecure. In (his) research over three decades (Gerbner) found that people who watch a lot of TV are more likely than others to believe their neighborhoods are unsafe, to assume that crime rates are rising, and to overestimate their own odds of becoming a victim. They also buy more locks, alarms, and- you guessed it- guns, in hopes of protecting themselves. 'They may accept and even welcome,' Gerbner reports, 'repressive measures such as more jails, capital punishment, harsher sentences- measures that have never reduced crime but never fail to get votes- if that promises to relieve their anxieties. That is the deeper dilemma of violence-laden television."- Barry Glassner

The quote above is taken from an excerpt I read in The Culture of Fear. To me, it means that the more violence we watch on television, the more the thought that we live in a violent world in instilled into our mind. While the television portrays a dramatized version of reality to keep viewers interested, the more time we spend watching it, the less time we spend out in the real world observing how wrong television's portrayal of life is. This evokes us to fear common things that we normally wouldn't fear and that potentially won't harm us. 

Take a look at the following gif;

Dramatized or not, it gets the point across; we are exposed to over-dramatized stories on the news, on television, in books, everywhere! Our mind absorbs the information we are given and leads us to fear something as simple as a small dog just because we heard of a dog of an unrealistic size attacking it's owner out of the blue, even though we know this behavior isn't common.

The fear-saturated media we are exposed to does affect our happiness and our lives; it causes us to curl up within ourselves when we are in the midst of the subject of the latest news story. As for the criminal justice system, the way certain individuals of a particular race are portrayed immediately puts them at either an advantage or disadvantage from a legal standpoint. When you are walking down a dark alley at night and see a tall man of African American descent, you're probably going to relate back to the stories you've been exposed to and instantly start to feel fear inflicted by them and that person. 

When we become afraid of other people, we end up spending our money on security systems that we feel will provide protection from people roaming the streets and that results in a larger income for security system manufacturers.

Another short story I read was Once Upon a Time, by Nadine Gordimer. Her story was of a family who was so set on protecting themselves from the dangers of the burglars outside their household that the measures they went to to ensure their safety caused the death of their son. This is similar to The Culture of Fear because both stories talk of the danger of how fear is instilled upon us and the negative effect it has on us. The media is only increasing our fear of the world and the income of sellers of security systems. In buying into the stories we constantly lose our grasp on reality and what is really harmful to us; in Once Upon a Time, what the family was told to fear isn't what ended up being the danger in the end. The real danger was what they had become as a result of what they were told and believed.