wokeuptired:

benwinstagram:

Nowhere is safe… can’t go to the club, can’t go to school, can’t go to concerts, can’t take the subway like what can you do ?

hey so without minimizing the terror of what happened tonight, i want to share this video, where vox producer carlos maza talks about how the way terrorism is covered by the media enhances and alters the way that we perceive terrorism. basically he says that when you turn on cable news and see 24-hour news coverage of an incident and the same violent footage over and over, your brain starts to think that terrorism is common—when in actuality, the chances of you or someone you know being involved in a terrorist attack are really, really, really small. 

it’s also important to remember that news networks make money off of views during coverage of terrifying events: the more a news network sensationalizes an event, the more they show horrifying footage, the more they interview visibly shaken witnesses… the harder it’s going to be for their viewers to look away. which leads to more money for them, and increased fear in communities (which is then exploited by politicians through fear mongering and what security expert bruce schneier, who is interviewed in the video, calls “security theater”).

i found what’s said in this video to be comforting because it’s really easy to come away from a night of news coverage like we had tonight and be afraid. it would be really easy for me to work myself up tonight and go to work tomorrow and watch my classroom fill with students and wonder how many of them will make it to adulthood, because this and that and the other thing. it would be really easy for me to think that everything is futile because the world is so fucked up that the little things we do aren’t going to matter in the long run, but that kind of thinking isn’t healthy.

i’m not saying that it’s wrong to be afraid. we are living in a bizarre, upside-down world full of things to be afraid of. i want to echo what maza and schneier say in the video: you have to be a skeptical consumer of news. you have to remember who produces the news you watch and why they do it. but even more than that, you have to protect your heart, and you have to keep yourself from operating out of a place of fear. 

terrible things happen every day. we have to talk about them and we have to give them the respect they deserve and we have to figure out why they happened and how we can stop them from happening again. and we have to resist the urge to let fear dictate our actions.