Fear, Power And Identity

When in the course of a human’s life it becomes necessary to break free from certain destructive behaviors and attitudes, it is beneficial to both the individual and to mankind to specify the grievances which impel them to take such an action. By making this public statement, we hope to strengthen our own resolution.

When it comes to The Hunger Games series, there are many events that connect to the real world and possible future events. This book reminded me of times I have discussed issues in classes, and seen articles around the Internet. There are moments in the book where it mentions connections to events from all over the world. The theme of kids dying of hunger, a dying planet, and how there is a powerful authority of the rich over the poor are well represented in The Hunger Games. There is a strong possibility of these themes becoming more dominant over time if nothing changes.

Fear: an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat(Websters Dictionary).Fear is something that our lives have adapted to rarely use as our ancient predecessors have.In our day and age the concept of fear comes through the stress of work. We humans no longer fear a cold nor do we fear storms as our houses protect us and on average our life spans are longer as old in the Paleolithic was 33 while currently it is 71.5(Wikipedia Life Expectancy). Why then is our fear so extensive that it can make us freeze up? “The answer is our legacy of ancient fears, the result of having spent millions of years running from predators. Our fear response is more influenced by the ancient species we struggled to escape than any modern challenges.”(The evolutionary legacy of having been prey.By Rob Dunn) This is one of the statements about human life. If this is so how do we develop from terror to finding fear fun?

After I read the article, I had to sit back and digest the material for an entire day. The article force me to do some soul searching regarding my position on power, privilege, and oppression. Have I been so oblivious to my surroundings? I quickly thought about the six core values of social work: service, social justice, dignity and worth, importance of human relationships, integrity, & competence. Will I be able to help others; because like Spencer (2008) I took somethings in life for granted? It was ironic when I was reading the article that Martin Luther King Jr, Desmond Tutu, and Nelson Mandella came to mine. They all fought for the injustice and sacrificed much to change the minds of the one in the position of power.

“The only thing you have to fear is fear itself”, said Benjamin Franklin. This statement is truly a key theme in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Miller demonstrated how the fear of witches and the power of one of the characters lead to numerous injustices. The main character, Abigail Williams is the character that uses this fear and her power to wrongly accuse innocent people and create injustices. In Herb Block’s cartoons “We Now Have New and Important Evidence” and “I Have Now Here in My Hand…” both showed how the fear of communism and the power that Senator McCarthy had in Washington created wrongful accusations and injustices. My goal of this essay is to demonstrate how fear and power were used to create many injustices and how these themes were also prevalent in McCarthyism.

Before the year 1787, we were all in fear of tyranny. Thinking things would go back to like they were in England, with the king having complete power over everyone and everything, a group of delegates joined together to help calm these fears. They grouped in the summer of 1787, in the great land of Philadelphia, and wrote everything down. They came up with laws and rules and government ideas and formed it into what we call the Constitution of America (Background Essay). But how did this help keep us from tyranny? Well, in the list of laws, we also had rules for our government and how it would work. They split our government into three branches, the Legislative Branch, the Executive Branch, and the Judicial Branch. Now, these branches work together

The novel can be interpreted in many different ways, however, one major theme in this novel is the idea of right versus wrong. The theme of right versus wrong is shown greatly throughout the entire book, even in parts of the plot that has not reached the climax. Mark and

In which school the shooting incident happened today? Should I help my child put on a bulletproof vest? Everyday miserable news are reported whenever we turn on TV. The news glue us to the TV screen and give us a sense of uneasiness. We feel living the extremely dangerous era.

6. If you had to summarize the theme of this novel, what would it be? What do you think are the big ideas about life that the author wants us to take away from our reading? What are the most important messages the author would would like us to take away from the

Which school has been targeted today? Should I help my child put on a bulletproof vest? Almost every day when we turn on the TV, there is a news about shooting. We are glued to the TV screen, feeling like living the extremely dangerous era. However, Barry Glassner, sociologist, claims that our sense of fear has been exaggerated intentionally, and we have remained enormously fearful for questionable dangers. Glassner’s book The Culture of Fear discloses that journalists, politicians and organizations handle our sense of fear to grab our attention and profit from our anxiety, giving actual cases. Glassner showcases crimes in the news that hid facts behind fictional things, that employed temporary crimes to avoid reporting existent crimes, and that were reported in the way

Redundant Fear Fear is an unpleasant emotion or feeling caused when someone or something is suspected to be harmful or dangerous. Fears come in all shapes and sizes, some keep one up all night, and some fears will prohibit one from doing simple tasks. In “Culture of Fear” by Barry Glassner the main topic discusses about fear and its impact on society.

Engrossed in fear, many Americans are living under the false perceptions portrayed by the media. This tendency is due to the underestimated power the media has in over society. With all the different forms of access the media has, it is almost a second nature to accept what the media is portraying as true. Why is it that, according to the Polly Klaas Foundation, although the” majority of missing children in our country are runaways”, three out four parents fear that their children will be kidnapped? Or that according to Skeptical Inquirer, “not a single death or injury has been reported from a stranger poisoning Halloween candy since 1958”, yet parents still fear for their children? Or according to if you add up all the mentions in the press of the millions of Americans with heart disease, cancer, migraines, or other illnesses, you’d find that the total number of Americans supposedly afflicted with a serious disease is 543 million- a shocking number in a nation of around 322 million. “Scratch the surface of any pseudo-fear and you’ll find a wide array of groups that stand to benefit from promoting the scares, and that we waste tens of billions of dollars and person-hours every year on largely mythical dangers,” writes Barry Glassner in The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things (Glassner). We ought to start doubting our

The employment of torture to an individual not only leaves a physical and psychological mark, but creates an altered reality that the victim must now adjust to. The authors of Victims of Fear: The Social Psychology of Repression, argue that “Like all experiences of trauma, the torture experience needs to be worked through in the context in which it occurred by reconstructing and reliving it in all its horror and thereby coming to terms with its personal and social meaning” (Salimovich,80). Alternatively, in The Illness of Exile, author Caroline Moorehead, notes that “what they needed was not medical help, which perpetuated their sense of being victims, but practical assistance in putting their lives onto a tolerable footing” (Moorehead,

In Machiavelli’s “Prince” he discussed the use of fear as a political tool to maintain the state. He argued that fear when properly directed could generate loyalty and bolster the support of the government. He went on to write that fear was only powerful when wielded with care and when abused could quickly become counterproductive and result in being hated by the people. Fear was potent because it was the prince’s creation. Unlike love that is given to the prince and can easily be taken away, fear is the prince’s tool and his alone. “…men love at their own free will but fear at the will of the prince…” Politicians throughout history have used fear tactics with varying degrees of success. For the purpose of my argument I will compare

Culture of Fear, by Frank Furedi, is a book that looks at how widespread fear impacts Western cultures like the United States and Great Britain. Frank Furedi believed that society tends to panic too much, as we actually enjoy "an unprecedented level of safety." I admit that Frank Furedi's novel is based upon a novel concept, and an interesting one at that. However, Frank Furedi comes off to me as little more than a fear monger and an intellectual elitist. His book, to me, seems redundant more often than not. But sometimes part of college is learning about points of view that you may not agree with, so I tried to maintain that perspective when I read the book.