Word: panic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...some trucks is a tracking device similar to the transponders used on commercial jets. The device beams a truck's location by satellite to fleet managers, while a two-way messaging system allows drivers and trucking officials to stay in touch. Qualcomm Inc. of San Diego offers truckers a panic button. When it's pushed, a ping sounds in the company's network management center, a NASA-style command base with 31 computer monitors. In an emergency, an operator can alert authorities to the location of the truck in distress...
...they quickly discovered that the best way to strike terror and confusion within the U.S. government was to send the contaminated mail to a Congress that can't agree on anything even in the best of times. Be calm, our leaders told us. No need to panic, they insisted. But to a jittery America those pleas sounded like the orchestra that kept playing after the Titanic hit the iceberg...
...focus here is cockeyed; it is not fear that one should fear--not fear itself. It is panic, which is the fear of the shapeless, of the enemy without uniform, the front without a front. The unspecificity of the FBI's warning tends to incite panic--so darkly imaginative does the mind become when it attempts to embrace the unembraceable. Cervantes said "fear is sharp-sighted, and can see things underground, and much more in the skies." He was really referring to that transitional state when fear, which is a sober and potentially useful attitude, becomes something out of control...
...asked an Israeli, Professor Moshe Halbertal, who is visiting at the University of Pennsylvania law school, how we Americans should be dealing with our sudden unwanted education. And he told me that the way to prevent fear from becoming panic is to hold onto one's sense of order in the face of the chaos the terrorist seeks to create. "Panic is unspecified, untargeted anxiety," he said, "not channeled to place and time. The terrorist seeks to be unspecific to place and time, even to his own enmity. He wants to make everyone appear the enemy." This...
...speak of things "not specific to target" may have been necessary, but it is the stuff of panic nonetheless. A dozen, two dozen more terrorist attacks would not injure the country as much as that...