Source: Time
What Roosevelt got wrong 75 years ago
It was 75 years ago, on Jan. 6, 1941, that President Franklin Roosevelt stood to deliver the State of the Union address that would become one of his most famous.
“At no previous time has American security been as seriously threatened from without as it is today,” Roosevelt admitted, but he still had hope for a future that would encompass the “four essential human freedoms”—including freedom from fear. And when Pearl Harbor was attacked at the end of that year, news reports from the time showed that Americans indeed responded with determination more than fear.
Nearly three quarters of a century later, a poll released in December found that Americans are more fearful of terrorism than at any point since Sept. 11, 2001. And while recent events like the attacks in ISIS-inspired attacks in Paris and the fatal shootings in San Bernardino, Calif. may have Americans particularly on edge, experts say that Roosevelt’s advice has gone unheeded for sometime. “My research starts in the 1980s and goes more or less till now, and there have been very high fear levels in the U.S. continuously,” says Barry Glassner, president of Lewis & Clark college and author of The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things.
Firm data on fear levels only go back so far, so it’s hard to isolate a turning point. Gallup polls on fear of terrorism only date to about the time of the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995. (At that point, 42% of respondents were very or somewhat worried about terrorism; the post-9/11 high markfor that question is 59% in October of 2001, eight percentage points above last month’s number.) Other questionnaires about fear of terrorism date back to the early 1980s, following the rise of global awareness of terrorism in the previous decade, as Carl Brown of Cornell University’s Roper Center public opinion archives points out. Academics who study fear use materials like letters and newspaper articles to fill in the gaps, and those documents can provide valuable clues.
Categories: America, Psychology, Terrorism, The Muslim Times, USA