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Culture Of Fear By Barry Glassner Analysis

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Balyodh Bhangu
Sociology 1010
26 September, 2017
Essay B1
Fearing the Good and Bad
Fear is something that will always keep people up at night, whatever we do fear will always be there we can’t do anything about it, but we can choose what we want to fear. The article “Culture of Fear” by Barry Glassner focuses on the idea of fear, and it’s toll on society and culture of it’s inhabitants. Barry talks about the idea of how one event no matter how small can make us fearful inside. For example if one lives in New York and one see’s police brutality, he/she will always have a fear of cops. Barry also goes on to talk about stereotypes and how when something like an explosion or disaster happens we automatically think of Arabs. Another main…show more content…
Misplaced Fears
These misplaced fears can be very concerning, they do have their pros and cons. (Glassner 1999:45) “The more things change the more pessimistic we become” Glassner is saying is that the more changes that society assumes the more concerning we become of what is going to happen. This is not a good thing, when society has these misplaced fears they tend to be at the back of their heads 24-7. The more changes society endures the more dreadful and sorrowful it’s inhabitants become. Even though society may be accustomed to change that does not mean that the people in that society are. (Glassner 1999;46) “Valid fears have their place: they cue us to danger. False and over-drawn fears only cause hardships”, This quote by Glassner is the main idea of the whole topic. Things that we actually need to be afraid of make us feel a sense of danger are scaredness, but things that we usually don’t need to fear, but we still do give us nothing but trouble and hardships. Glassner uses the example of women’s breast, (Glassner 1999:46) “A study of daughters of women with breast cancer found an inverse correlation between fear and prevention: the greater a daughter’s fear of the disease the less frequent her breast self-examination”. Daughters of women who had breas cancer are so afraid of having breast cancer they wont even go to the doctors to go and get checked. These daughters are so afriad that they don’t even wanna know that they may have breast cancer even
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