Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Fear

I identify myself as a "freaker". I am irrationally afraid of many things - murderers, balconies, terror, knives, fire, earthquakes, sudden changes, spiders, the list goes on. I think that there is a "freaker", although to maybe a smaller degree, in everyone. The media plays off of this freaker attitude by fear mongering. In movies, television, radio, magazines and more, fear sells. One of the main reasons fear sells, especially when the feared are living, breathing beings, is because people love to rally against something to hate.

It is pretty evident to me that love is a pillar of society. I experience it every day. But how much do we experience hatred every day? How much do we experience that we don't recognize?

We read an article in Animal Planet about sharks and watched a video called Sharkwater. Historically, I'm not a huge fan of sharks, going so far as to not go past knee deep in the ocean in both Florida and Hawaii (even though I don't even know if sharks are there). How many of us have ever seen a shark in person?

Sharkwater portrays sharks in a much different light than Jaws does, or even Shark Week. The objective of Sharkwater is to show the public that sharks are much less aggressive and blood thirsty than we think they are, our thoughts and actions sculpted by portrayals in the media. Rob Stewart, the main person in Sharkwater told of how sharks actually fear humans as much if not more than we fear them. They can't even physically eat humans easily because of our body shape. But how many people know that?? I certainly didn't before watching this movie.

Immediately my mind jumped to terrorism. Media thrives off of demonizing sharks, the beasts of the sea. Media in America also thrives by instilling fear in the American population by demonizing and sensationalizing the terrorists in the Middle East. As I am learning more and more, I find that there are so many more sides to the issue of our involvement in the Middle East and our conceptions of Islam to which I have not been previously exposed. I won't get into these details now, but I want to point out the important parallels between the demonization of Islam and the demonization of Sharks.

Sharks have been known to eat people (not whole, but yes kill people). About five per year. Terrorists killed mass amounts of Americans in the 9/11 attacks. No one can justify either of these events. Now, sharks killing people unintentionally is much different than the intentional attacks of 9/11 that were meant to cause serious destruction, damage, sorrow, and terror. However, I want to focus on the aspect of beast making, (bear with me on the language here) of focusing all of the negative energy on one thing and ignoring the un-negativeness of other things associated with that thing.

I was disturbed and saddened by a tweet on Twitter I came across a couple days ago. A girl tweeted, "Islam midterm's reference site is iraqisthebomb.com #f*** (not actually starred out) #that #terrorist #shit." I was disappointed, especially since neither Iraq nor Iran nor Afghanistan were the source of the 9/11 attacks, but rather Al Qaeda. It's just those kind of ignorant comments that make me so frustrated with the negative media because they perpetuate them. The media has demonized not only the source of the attacks, which is arguably justified considering what they did, but more importantly - the whole Middle East. Being a bad, Western world hating person is not a criteria for living in the Middle East. They are people just like you and I. Yet the fear that has been instilled in us causes that tension, causes that push to jump to conclusions. I would venture to say that the percentage of the American population that knows to the best of their abilities with readily available information a detailed history of our involvement with the various countries in the Middle East is very small. I certainly don't.

Sharks are in no way on the same level as terrorists, but the idea of fear mongering is applicable to both and many other aspects of life. I certainly don't hold all of the knowledge of the world. I don't expect anyone else to. However, it's time to hold humanity as a whole, hold each other, to a higher standard. When we are judgmental, malicious, and ignorant we are hurting others and ultimately ourselves. We must be careful with our words and analyze how our limited knowledge shapes our different paradigms through which we see the world.

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