There are plenty of people that are scared to walk in certain neighborhoods, or visit certain venues, or are concerned that they or their loved ones could be randomly attacked at any given moment. To a certain degree, those that are concerned about their safety, are being sensible and prudent, for there are for a certainty, bad actors out there. The problem though comes when our concern about our personal safety exceeds the reality of our situation, in which, we end up being scared or frightened about things that could happen to us which aren’t going to realistically happen.
For instance, there are people that feel that a terrorism attack could occur if they decide to fly, or that they are in some reasonable danger of a terrorist act happening in their community, when the true possibility of those things actually happening to them, aren’t going to be appreciably higher than being struck by lightning. To a large extent, we can be our own worse enemy, because we spend too much of our time, permitting ourselves to be scared, by listening to or watching those types of reports, that present us with notorious crimes and present-day dangers, that we then “project” as being something that could happen to us. Sure, bad things happen each and every day, but then again, America is a really large country, which has troubling civil unrest and other worrying issues, due to all sorts of reasons, which aren’t going to be solved anytime soon. That though doesn’t mean that the trouble need reach us, especially if we are sensible and prudent in our behavior and actions, so taken.
The disappointing thing though is that our own government, has its reasons why it wants us as a people, to be scared and frightened, because the more that we feel that we could be attacked by another country in some sort of sneak attack, or by a terrorist organization, we find that this often goes hand in glove with a willingness by the general public to thereby sacrifice some of their freedoms and liberty, in exchange for more security and safety. While this might seem to make sense, it has to be recognized, that powerful governments, including our own, aren’t really all that comfortable with the general population having unlimited and unrestrained freedom and liberty, because their preference is often to have a population that marches to the beat of that government, so as to be better able to manipulate the people, or redirect them in the direction that the government feels is beneficial to it.
So then, governments often make it their point, to create for the people, a simplistic binary choice, of which it is sold to the people that either they can have all the liberty that they are entitled to by that governance, or if they are sensible in these troubling times, they can voluntarily relinquish some of that freedom, for their own safety and security. While this might even seem like a good thing to a whole lot of people, the problem is that governments want their people to believe that only their strong government can protect them, and this can only occur if they know everything about their people, so as to properly protect them, and those that willingly provide all their personal information to the government in regards to who and what they are, have sacrificed their freedom, for possible safety, or possibly the opportunity for that government to better manipulate and to control them.