If people aren’t panicked, they wouldn’t elect panic-pandering politicians, so there must always be a panic — crime, drugs, commies, libruls, etc.
For republicans, ‘fear’ is their identity, and republicans love playing identity politics with it. They make up threats where there is none. My father for example doesn’t want lax immigration in case “someone comes over here with a bomb”. oh ok pops.
I have a co-worker who doesn’t want immigrants because she thinks they’re all unvaccinated and thus spreaders of disease. She is also anti-vax.
I have to also wonder if it is due to people not understanding how things work.
When I moved from my rural area to a large local city, my small town father was quite concerned everything he saw on the evening news was happening in my neighborhood nightly too.
Every fire, gang shooting, stabbing, car theft, etc on the news that night was next door to me. He was pretty concerned in the beginning. He grew up in a pretty remote place which was small.
He passed over 10 years ago now and this was before social media really started to become our main sources of our curated news, not that he had a cellphone or a computer so I think for people like him social media would be even more effective at ramping up that fear of everything beyond the nonsense of the supermarket tabloids that had general threats and BS.
Now today’s social media and news entertainment can really zoom in on creating specific fears for each person or highlight BS that isn’t even a part of their normal lives to worry about.
My father had fairly outdated ideas like everything he saw in the press must be true because they wouldn’t be allowed to print it otherwise. That included the tabloids. I can only imagine those that digest social media click bait fall into this trap pretty far…
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Part of it could just be parenting instincts. My wife is from a country where you can get heat stroke all year long. The first year, after our first child’s was born, my mother-in-law would call after every snow fall.
Are you alright? Is the baby alright? How do you keep your house warm? Oh God what if you have to go into the car, there is no heat, and the baby dies!?
Took reassurance and time. She really is a sweet woman.
Where i am at people have lost all hope or any kind of belief in the police force
People aren’t reporting everything as they have collectively decided our police force is useless past a police report for insurance
And they more or less are
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the 24 hour news cycle plays a huge part in this, especially with local news.
They’ve expanded news from 30 minutes of national, and 30 minutes of local news a day, to 24 hour national coverage, and like 6+ hours of local coverage a day.
and theres just not that much shit going on to warrant that much coverage, especially in the local. So they start reporting stories from other places, so they always have some bullshit fear provoking shit to repeat ad nasuem for hours on end just to have something to fill the airwaves with.
So people are utterly convinced that crime is skyrocketing, despite all proof to the contrary.
This is a phenomena I’ve seen in my own family. THe more they watch the news, the worse they think crime is getting, and they just refuse any evidence to the contrary because “why would the news lie?!”.
And they can’t stand it when I say “For Ratings, obviously”
Really interesting how networks will never mention how wage theft is greater than all retail theft combined
I think people forget that the phrase “If it bleeds it leads.” for local news.
The news’ job is to tell us about the weird not so likely thing. But if that is all you ever see and hear then it must be happening more often.
