Florida had a tough week last week. First a terrorist attack, then an alligator attack on a toddler.
The various reactions in the media were not really surprising in either case, and their striking similarities, despite being completely different types of tragic events, say a lot about our society.
After the first event, I expected the reactions from the LGBTQ+ side, the gun-control side, the Second Amendment supporters, and the Islamophobes as numerous pundits on all sides dipped their pens in the blood of the dead and wounded and went to work placing blame where they each thought it most needed to be placed.
One thing of note: The terrorist checked his Facebook during the attack. The leading theory why: He wanted to see if his attack had gone viral.
After the second event, though, I thought I was in some parody world. A little boy playing on a beach that was constructed for people to play on, an alligator doing what alligators do--stealthily staying invisible as they stalk--a father who jumped in the water and fought a 10-foot alligator to try to save his boy.
Sad, but whom to blame?
Worry not, the blame team was still on the job. Why were the parents not watching? (I'm not sure how else one of them could have jumped on the alligator if he were not watching). Why did Disney allow there to be alligators in a lake in Florida? (Try keeping them out).
The part even more weird was the stream of "news" segments featuring alligator experts explaining what to do if you are attacked by an alligator. Their main advice? "Fight like hell." Got it.
Mind you, these segments were being aired in climates where there have been no alligators since the Jurassic period. Why such fascination? Fear. The terrorist in the first event demonstrated our enemy's deliberate use of fear as a weapon in our own backyard. The second event demonstrated our hysterical, debilitating vulnerability to that weapon.
Fear. Build us a homeland defense against that.
I think there are some efforts in that direction, misguided though they are: Eliminate all the things that scare us. As the song goes, "We'd all love to see the plan."
The truth is, though, it won't work. Even if we could wipe the world clean of scary things, the fear was never inflicted on us from the outside. It comes from inside us.
If you are afraid of the dark, turning on all the lights in the world won't change that. It might put it aside for the moment, as long as the lights are on, as long as you pay the light bill. But it's still there. You can't escape it.
The only sane thing you can do is manage it, refuse to let it control you. Master it. "Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death ..."
The thing is, that's the last thing the media want. Fear sells. It may be the only thing that sells better than sex. Fear is big business, huge business. Fear is power, potentially world-destroying power. Why else do salesmen, pundits and politicians alike fan it wherever it is kindled--fan it in the direction they want it to burn?
We are a society steeped in fear. The people who want to sell us things know this. The people who want our votes know this. Our enemies know this. I know this.
Some of you reading this have already realized that I am attempting to make use of your own fear right now. Excellent. That means you know this. So what will you do with that knowledge?
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Dennis J. Humphrey, Ph.D, is division chair and professor of English at the English and Fine Arts Division of Arkansas State University at Beebe.
Editorial on 06/24/2016