America's new War (of) Terror.
On the eve of the first anniversary of September 11th, my roommates and I huddled around our kitchen table and worried. Logically, we knew that terrorists weren’t going to strike Portland, Oregon, but there’s your brain and there’s your central nervous system. And, emotionally, we managed to rile ourselves up, not into a panic, but probably we didn’t get the best sleep.
During the War on Terror, Americans were getting daily reminders to be scared. “If you see something say something”; in the right-wing propaganda pumped out by Fox News; in prestige media, idiotically subservient to the national security state; Homeland; 24; your crazy Islamophobic uncle. Remember the threat level color chart?
The national and global ramifications are well known. After millions of deaths and forced dislocations and a refugee crisis (that would lead to the election of right-wing Trumps around the world)—we wound down the “War on Terror.” Some people even admitted they may have been wrong to push US military adventurism.
I bring this up because today’s crime panics remind me of it—except now, everyone’s shackled to the news cycle 24-7, so the sense of certain doom never ends (I use the war on terror as a comparison, rather than past crime or drug panics, because the media environment is more similar to our own. Obviously I don’t think a national crime panic is at the scale of geopolitical catastrophe ).
At every level of media—local, national, prestige, cable—we’re told to be scared of “crime and disorder” in urban spaces (read: visibly homeless people). Blue city lawmakers won’t shut up about it. And it erodes our ability to distinguish between discomfort and danger. Cooler heads than me are pointing out that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions about what happened on the F train, but based on preliminary witness reports, it sounds like something I—and everyone living in New York—has experienced. You encounter an agitated, disheveled person on the street or on the train platform or the train and they start yelling. It’s extremely uncomfortable. You have conflicting emotions: alarm, sadness, anger. You curse yourself for choosing to live in this foul city. If they get closer your heart starts speeding up a bit. You wonder at what point it’s wise to remove yourself, but don’t want to be the person who looks scared of homeless people. And, also, we should all think about how unimaginably horrible it is to live a life where anytime you go somewhere, other people shrink away from you. It’s basically an episode of Black Mirror (literally the one with Jon Hamm).
But is it particularly dangerous? You never know, I guess. But statistically, given the minuscule rate of murders among strangers it’s a lot more dangerous to walk down the street, not because of homeless people, but because of drivers. There have been 70 traffic fatalities in New York City in 2023 so far. But Eric Adams doesn’t rant and rave about bad drivers or speeding and they don’t quite get the same coverage on Fox. Political careers don’t rise and fall on the issue of bad driving. In our twisted, perverse information eco system, the only time a traffic fatality lodges semi-permanently in the discourse is when it turns out the driver was out on bail—then the incident is used to bludgeon criminal justice reformers.
Here’s another possibly strained parallel to the War on Terror. Social panics create a fear spiral—a positive feedback loop. The US’s boneheaded tortures and rights violations and spying and suspicion of Muslims clearly radicalized some young men in the US and abroad. With homeless people, the more we’re told they’re going to hurt us, the less likely we are to extend compassion—money, food, a smile— which in turn further alienates them. People are more scared, and therefor less compassionate. There was some tumult on Twitter because one of the witnesses said the incident could’ve been prevented if someone had given him food or a drink. They were mocked for suggesting you could fix psychosis that way. I don’t know, it seems to me that there’s no mental illness that improves when you’re hungry, thirsty and lonely.
Beyond that, I am mad about this for selfish reasons. The times I’ve been least happy in my life were while in the throes of anxiety. The times I am by far the happiest is when I travel and when I do on-the-ground reporting in new places, both of which require that you not be terrified of the world. Apparently, everyone in Gen Z is anxious. Politicians fearmonger for political gain; media fearmonger for profit, and everyone loses.