{"id":18308,"date":"2013-04-23T11:46:42","date_gmt":"2013-04-23T15:46:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=18308"},"modified":"2013-04-23T11:46:42","modified_gmt":"2013-04-23T15:46:42","slug":"freaking-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=18308","title":{"rendered":"Freaking Out"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Frequently-freaked-out <a href='http:\/\/dish.andrewsullivan.com\/2013\/04\/23\/terror-in-america-ctd\/'>Andrew Sullivan<\/a> is freaking-out because he thinks America excessively freaked-out over the Boston bombings.<\/p>\n<p>update: ... actually I'm going to solve the Sullivan problem once and for all: I'm going to stop reading him. <\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Which means bin Laden succeeded as well \u2013 in simply terrorizing Americans. Take this statistic: the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism found that the number of terror attacks in the US in the decade before 9\/11 was 41 a year. Since 9\/11, it has been 19 a year. And yet our terror panic endures \u2013 and even grows. It seems we cannot yet simply live with and through  occasional terror. We demand its complete absence, in the black-and-white way Americans often do:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Aside from the people right there on the ground when it happened, I didn't see any public panic or terror over the past week. The people running away from the explosions, terrified; obviously. People watching it on TV: not so terrified. In my reading and listening, I saw outrage, politicking, finger-pointing, pre-blaming. People were eager for news and news outlets were over-eager to deliver. People were thrilled following the coverage of the shootouts, chase, manhunt, capture. People were annoyed by the 'lockdown', thinking the citizens of Boston should be free to take their chances out on the streets (which seems to be the complete <i>opposite<\/i> of \"terror panic\"). Other people were annoyed by those who were annoyed. Etc.. I didn't see any \"terror panic\". It wasn't a freak-out. It was shock, outrage, and then excitement about the chase. And now it's just politicking.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I wrote about this for my Sunday column. I am second to none in finding these acts morally outrageous, which is why we need to exercise more control in not giving them more power over our psyches than we need to. I think, in many ways, we\u2019re still living with 9\/11 collective PTSD: <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Who's this \"we\", Sully? It ain't me. It ain't anyone I know. It ain't anyone who isn't in the business of stroking his\/her audience's fear center. IMO, anyone who wants to 'diagnose' a <i>country<\/i> with PTSD is probably someone who could benefit from taking a break from the 24\/7 instant-opinion echo-chamber; put down the rage-pipe for a while and go take a walk in the real world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Frequently-freaked-out Andrew Sullivan is freaking-out because he thinks America excessively freaked-out over the Boston bombings. update: ... actually I'm going to solve the Sullivan problem once and for all: I'm going to stop reading him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18308\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}