CSotD: Fear Factor
Skip to comments
Here is a small piece of a longer work by Natalie Nourigat that is at once the saddest and also the most encouraging thing I've seen in a very long time. You need to go read the whole thing.
(I'll wait.)
I feel very bad about the way we've slowly immersed ourselves in a police-state mentality, but particularly guilty in that the youngest among us have grown up knowing little else.
I can't quite put a starting point on it, but certainly the 1981 abduction and murder of Adam Walsh was a critical junction. The tragedy became something of a societal fetish for reasons I can't explain.
That is, the 1953 Bobby Greenlease kidnapping and murder was a legend among little kids of the era, and it emphasized the importance to us of not talking to strangers, of avoiding people who tried to lure you into their cars and so forth.
However, it did not sprout its own industry.
Not only did Adam Walsh's father parlay his grief into a starring role in "America's Most Wanted," but there also sprang up a multitude of "experts," who went around delivering (paid) lectures (and selling books and videos) on how to avoid the hordes of violent sexual deviants who were waiting to rape and murder your children, and there also emerged a lucrative business in selling kits to civic groups for the completely pointless purpose of fingerprinting children.
For every positive, sensible "good-touch, bad-touch" lesson kids were taught, they — and their parents — were inundated with "Stranger Danger" and "Satanic Panic" until sensible precautions were overwhelmed by thoughtless, out-of-proportion fear and the idea of allowing a kid to just go out and play was all but unthinkable.
Meanwhile, TV and movies began to capitalize on this paranoia porn, making a transformation from depictions of good guy cops who shot the gun out of the crook's hand to an escalating perversity of violence and despair in which not only is the world continually presented to us as a cesspool of depravity, but as one in which, even if the cops are on our side, they're all but helpless to control things.
The perversity and vulgarity aside, the resulting paranoia is a cruel hoax to have foisted upon the generation Natalie Nourigat represents, and I feel genuinely bad that we have destroyed the sense of well-being and security with which we were gifted in our childhood.
Seeing the weight of it in her depiction makes me depressed; but seeing the spirit with which she kicks back against it gives me a great deal of hope.
I particularly like how she focuses, not on fixing blame but on her own reaction.
That's the only thing any of us can really be responsible for, and it's a message that cannot be said too often, especially when, as here, it is delivered with such unbounded joy.
Very nicely done.
Things to Watch:
Jack Elrod retired from the Mark Trail strip at the end of March, after turning 90. The new strips by James Allen are just starting to show up. I like what I'm seeing of his style so far, and wouldn't mind if the daily plots improved a little, but the real test will be the Sundays, which are the heart and soul of this classic feature.
Meanwhile, the classic Norm strips over at GoComics are getting into one of the best sequences of an excellent strip. Here are Saturday's and this morning's strips.
Norm camping out in line for the first of the Star Wars sequels was a hoot. If you missed it then, jump aboard now. And to those who saw it the first time around, you're welcome. Enjoy.
Juxtaposition of the Day
(Monty)
Comments 1
Comments are closed.