Chapter 9 & 10

This post will cover both chapter 9 (Final Thoughts) and 10 ( New Fears for A New Century) but seeing how chapter 9 is seven pages long and chapter 10 is around forty pages long so chapter 9's reflection will be shorter than 400 words and chapter 10 will be over that.

Chapter 9 compares and contrasts fears in the previous chapters with a 1938 radio broadcast called War of the Worlds. War of the Worlds was a completely fictional broadcast about Martians coming and destroying the earth. " The pressing question is the same now as it was in 1938: Why do people embrace improbable pronouncements?"(Glassner 205). Glassner contributes part of the answer to "people with fancy titles" which appear in almost every scare. In War of the World's, people found the broadcast believable because people with powerful names gave the radio play a more "credible feel" said Hadley Cantril a social psychologist at Princeton. The people that had theses credible titles normally weren't leaders in that field but gifted speakers that, in more cases than not, had no scientific evidence to back them up. Another thing that gets people to believe a scare is other people. The common people, for example, women that had breast implants saying they felt pain and discomfort though they had no evidence they were widely believed because of their first-hand accounts. Professional narrators also help move the scare along by expressing their own disbelief in what is happening. The final thing that makes a scare hit home is "how well it expresses deeper cultural anxieties"(Glassner 208). Scares are used to shield one problem by bringing up another but the scares are not unrelated to the initial problem; they are used to indirectly address the problems that society refuses to fix. The overall message of the chapter is a statement of whether we will continue to buy into these scares or if we will try and fix the numerous problems in our society.

Chapter 10 is an update on how scares changed after 9/11. The media after 9/11 stopped focusing on the decline of American civilization and focused on the unity of American and America's great society which was a 180 degree flip from what it had been. Young American's before 9/11 were considered one of the worst groups of people but after the 9/11 incident America's youth were put almost on a pedestal in which they were portrayed as heroes. The first half of the chapter focuses on scares in the book that persisted after the 9/11 attack. The first scare was plane crashes which were dormant till a crash in 2009 which killed 50 people. This scare was blown out of proportion seeing how it was the first crash to cause a death in 2 and 1/2 years. Another scare which has always been blown out of proportion is road rage. In recent years road rages definition has broadened to include honking your horn to running someone over. Road rage developed into a new form of the mental disease and the media played up individuals brains rather than focus on the cause of their anger which came from many related sources. They also got in touch with people that seemed to have credible titles instead of actual experts. The majority of these problems contribute to a scare bing effect, which we learned in the last chapter. The next fear to take the stage is the Internet, which includes cyberporn, predators and more. This problem continually develops and changes as the internet does. The real problems that these scares hide are still around and true, considering that more children are abused by parents and caregivers than by any other group of people. The internet itself more often used as a tool than for dirty interactions with adults as the media may have you believe. The next set of scares all relates to America's youth, scares like kidnappings, teen pregnancy, and children vaccinations have continued past 9/11 and are still a major focus of the news media. Another scare mentioned relates to metaphor illnesses in this case autism and mold. Both were reputed with scientific studies but both continually lose in court due to the anecdotal evidence from people who are "afflicted" and large amounts of media attention. In the closing of the chapter Glassner talks about 9/11 and the Bush Administration and in essence tells how the Bush Administration messed up by stating things vaguely or out of context. In the end, Glassner's message is that America is founded and run by a cycle of fear in which fear promotes fear which promotes Americans inaction to fix a number of pressing problems, but Glassner has hope as should we that this cycle will not last forever.