The Biggest Monster Out There...

      Why is it that more people are scared of riding in an airplane than eating their lunch? Research has proven that 556 people per year are killed due do plane incidents while 5,051 individuals die from choking annually. Who is it to blame for the multiple irrational fears that constantly swirl through our minds? The media.
     The news media is both a wonderful blessing an unfortunate curse. During natural disasters, it keeps us updated on our safety, and during elections, it previews political candidates. It grabs the attention of our entire country and shines a light on incredible accomplishments. However, the media constantly selects unusual and rare fatal incidents to headline, spreading various fearful beliefs throughout society. All of these stories about plane crashes and toddler kidnappings that are displayed in bright letters on top of social media pages and televisions screens are simply not portraying the actual issues and concerns present in our everyday life. By showering individuals with tales of accidents that are one of a kind, we are ignoring issues such as poverty and racism that have threatened many for centuries.
     The majority of the population fails to see the common threats we encounter daily. As Lily Rothman states, a mom may be listening to a podcast about a kidnapping while her daughter is in front of her, riding a bike without a helmet. The reason we struggle in recognizing what to fear is that we crave the "juicy news". Simple ways to prevent death, such as driving with a seatbelt on, is "old news" and is nowhere near as interesting as hearing about a random guy from Idaho falling off a chairlift to his death.
      What can we do to stop this pattern? Educate. We must educate the youth on what and what not to fear by setting an example and trusting valid news information. In schools, we learn how to identify reliable sources and we must go through this same procedure while reading the news. Not only does ingesting a regular diet of social media make us sick with anxiety, but it pulls our attention from all of the good things happening in our world. The media is skilled at triggering fear and we must avoid this by using good judgment and not letting the media control what and what not to fear. After all, the media might be the biggest monster out there.
 
   
Articles
https://www.thoughtco.com/fearing-plane-crashes-obscures-real-dangers-3026202
https://www.nsc.org/home-safety/safety-topics/choking-suffocation
https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/02/health/plane-crash-deaths-intl/index.html
https://time.com/4158007/american-fear-history/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Prisoners Design What They Can't Buy- Luke

Luke Kirchner      I chose to read the article "Objects Made by Prisoners in the United States". This was a very interesting article, as it showed what it's like to be in an American prison and how they make some objects. When Prisoners are in prison, the severity of their punishments can vary, but the lack of creative freedom is often detrimental to each prisoner. This lack of freedom can sometimes drive their creativity to make their own objects, showing off individual expression. Some items like pens and toothbrushes were not given in the full form, due to the fear of prisoners turning them into weapons. Instead, the prisoners thought about how they could fix these problems. The article says "The items shown here, made by inmates in the U.S. prison system, illustrate the severity of restrictions imposed on prisoners as well as the human instinct to persevere through creativity and invention" (The Atlantic).      They took the ink cartridge for the pen an
Read more

Josey - The Fashion Industries Effect on the Enviroment

           Clothing production around the world has doubed since the year 2000, making the fashion indsutry the second biggest polluter in the world. The impact of the indsutry on the enviroment has always been substantial, but in recent years as it has continued to grow, the impact has grown with it. It is estimated that aproximately every second a truck load of clothing is dumped or burned in a landfill. Not only is this a huge amount of resources, but it is also clothing that could easily be reworn or recycled. This is an extremely wasteful amount and is not only affecting the resources that are used, but also the workers who are being forced to produce materials at extremely fast rates.            Wasting these materials is one of the major ways that this is having an effect on the enviroment but another is the waste that is produced and put into the enviroment. Often when factories produce clothing, once they are done they dump chemicals from the factory into rivers. These chemic
Read more

Recovering Ecosystems

Tyler Holland Mr. Roddy IHSS 26 March 2020 Recovering Ecosystems A large challenge for stopping the increasing problems that we face with air pollution and other environmental problems, is that humans are natural control freaks. People try so hard to invent new ways to control the risks that our Earth faces instead of just trying to let nature do its work. Isabella and Charlie, a couple who owned farmland in England, came to the realization that nature solves its own problems, after they had a run in with a feared weed for many farmers. Once they discovered the 'cursed thistle' in their farms they feared the worst as it spread so quickly, but they had decided to let it happen because using pesticides and chemicals was not an option for them. After a while they started to see a flourishing environment in their acres that they had not seen there before, painted lady butterflies flew across the land and after a while caterpillars were crawling all over their 60 acres and ea
Read more