Word: feare
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Power of Fear...
Unfortunately, that very fear has a way of increasing violence. Fearful citizens ignore the victim's cry for help; by shunning parks and other public places, they free muggers to attack isolated pedestrians. The U.S. mind is haunted by wanton multiple murder-16 people killed by a sniper in Austin, eight nurses slain by a demented drifter in Chicago. It is hard to convince the fearful that 80% of U.S. murders (half involve alcohol) are committed by antagonistic relatives or acquaintances, not strangers...
...above all, there is white fear of Negro attacks. While the Negro arrest rate for murder is ten times that among whites, most of the violent crimes committed by Negroes are against other Negroes. Of 172 Washington, D.C., murders in a recent two-year period, for example, only twelve were interracial. Yet fear that Negro riots are leading to some ghastly racial holocaust is fueling a vast, scandalously uncontrolled traffic in firearms that has equipped one-half of U.S. homes with 50 million guns, largely for "self-defense." All this is rationalized by virtue of the Second Amendment "right...
Today's fear of violence is rightly aimed at the terrifying anonymity of the big cities-of which 26, containing less than one-fifth of the U.S. population, account for more than half of all violent crimes. But this fear can be localized: violence is overwhelmingly a ghetto phenomenon; it is the slum dweller who suffers most and cries out for better police protection. In Atlanta, for example, the violent-crime rate in neighborhoods with incomes below $3,000 is eight times that among $9,000-income families...
...that all through history, violence has been the chief means of social reform. Even primitive Christians, proclaiming love, destroyed pagan temples to dramatize their cause. The Boston Tea Party had the same purpose. The 13th century King John's Magna Carta illustrated the oldest inducement for social reform: fear of "revolution or worse." To his credit, Marx argued against violence until societies were really ripe for change; most Western European labor terrorism disappeared as a result. But in romantic countries, including the U.S., revolutionary violence often became a mystique for purging feelings of inferiority. Explains Brandeis University Sociologist Lewis...