'Nothing feels safe:' Americans are divided, anxious and quick to panic
Although the country has suffered through far higher crime rates and similar periods of deep political division, were in uncharted territory in terms of anxiety, said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum and a former Boston police official. With the George Floyd murder, war in Ukraine, the questioning of elections, people dont know who to trust. Who would think that in an iconic place like Highland Park, you would need to post snipers on rooftops on the Fourth of July? But thats what weve come to.
Nothing feels safe anymore, he continued.
After years of violence and the social isolation brought by the pandemic, rhetoric on both shores of the national cultural and political gulf focuses on a yearning for security. On one side, its expressed as a craving for safe spaces and calls for acceptance of others. On the opposite side, its a nostalgia for a perceived golden age of social consensus.
In both cases, the political rhetoric reflects underlying jitters that lead to the kinds of street panics seen in May, when people emerging from the Barclays Center sports arena in Brooklyn stampeded toward safety after some heard pops that sounded like gunshots. In the panic, at least 10 people were injured, trampled to the pavement by others running, they thought, for their lives. In the end, there was no evidence of any gunfire.
Americans jitters have been exacerbated in recent weeks by threats against Pride parades in Idaho, North Carolina and other states, and by last weeks police shooting of a Black man in Akron, Ohio.
We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote in the Atlantic in April. We are cut off from one another and from the past.
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