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America 's Culture Of Fear

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America 's Culture of Fear Fear is defined as a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat is real or imagined; the feeling or condition of being afraid. Americans number one fear is corruption of government officials according to a 2015 survey of researchers at Chapman University. Other fears that top the list are terrorist attacks, identity theft, bio-warfare and government tracking of personal information. These more justifiable fears are just a part of anxiety ridden America. We are also afraid of aliens, Ebola and lets not forget the mass hysteria surrounding Y2K which promised to wreak havoc in computers and computer networks worldwide and cause all kinds of catastrophes. We are living at …show more content…

Propaganda ensures that people only get to know what their government wants them to know. In WWI, the lengths to which the government would go to in an effort to blacken the enemies name reached a new level. All forms of information were controlled, newspapers were expected to print what the government wanted the reader to read. Propaganda is as old as people, politics and religion. People will usually pull every string in their power to persuade everyone to agree with their agenda. One of the best known scare tactics used by politicians was Lyndon Johnson 's “Daisy”. The 1964 political advertisement begins with a 3 year old little girl, standing in a meadow with birds chirping while counting the petals of a daisy that she pulled off , repeating some numbers and counting in the wrong order. As people sat in their living rooms, smiling and feeling all warm and fuzzy about this sweet picture of innocence , the girl reaches the number 9 and pauses. This ad all the sudden takes a turn when a mans voice takes over saying “ten” at the start of a missile launch countdown. The camera then focuses on the girls eye until her pupil fills the screen, blacking totally out on zero .The blackness is instantly replaced with the thunderous sound of a nuclear explosion and a mushroom cloud. A voice over from Johnson states emphatically “These are the stakes, To make the world in which all God 's children can

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