With the discovery of human remains earlier this week, the harrowing search for Hannah Graham may have finally drawn to a close. Though its human element risked getting lost in a media circus, Hannah Graham’s disappearance brought about a discussion of the brutal realities of gender-based violence and the pain that comes from losing someone who, as third-year student Erin Dyer said, “touched every single student at this school” in her absence. At the same time, Graham’s vanishing has left many students feeling fear more than any other emotion. Amidst panic over the Ebola virus and the Islamic State, suspicion and distrust seem to dominate the national mood as well. That said, giving into fearful impulses only makes overcoming our collective alienation and pressing problems that much harder.
There’s no question that there are few fates more terrifying than the kinds of crimes police are alleging Jesse Matthew committed against Hannah Graham. Faced with these horrors, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that Charlottesville is a hotbed of abduction and murder. With a metro population of 206,615 people, however, there have only been five disappearances of young women over the past five years, two of which can be connected to Jesse Matthew. This means there is less than a ten-hundredth of a percent chance of someone else in our community experiencing the nightmare of what happened to Hannah any given year. Furthermore, from 2001 to 2010, violent crime in Virginia declined by 27 percent and rapes declined by 22 percent, with nationwide crime rates approaching historic lows as well. The point of sharing these statistics is not to minimize the unspeakable crimes that occur locally and nationwide or to suggest that it’s unreasonable to ever be scared of the world’s violence. It is merely to suggest that addressing community-wide problems like gender-based violence inherently require a certain level of trust that fear will always inhibit and suppress.
The same resistance to fear should applied to dealing with Ebola, though unlike abduction, Ebola is not something from which thousands of Americans suffer yearly. In a 2006 study at UCLA, researchers found that disease-driven fear led to “participants [increasing] their preference for the American over the foreigner.” I would argue there have been more voices on the right exploiting fear over Ebola (Rush Limbaugh claiming Obama’s refusal to instate a travel ban is payback for slavery, for instance), but Democrats have also been distastefully pinning the lack of a cure on Republican budget cuts. As Brian Beulter writes for The New Republic, “the issue with Ebola isn’t the virus itself so much as paranoia about it” for the average American. In Liberia, Ebola is a real nationwide matter of life and death, but here it has become another tool to direct people’s anger away from the real problems of their everyday lives.
Just as Ebola has been exploited to gin up fear of Africans, the rise of ISIS has been accompanied by intense Islamophobia and panic about phantom terrorist attacks. Despite the FBI stating there are “no specific or credible threats to the US homeland from the Islamic State militant group,” 71 percent of Americans believe ISIS has sleeper cells in the United States planning to attack. While the carnage of September 11th and the Boston Bombing is rightly seared into our collective imagination, the actual chances of an American dying in a terrorist attack are roughly 1 in 20 million, with lightning and dog bites coming in as more dangerous. The improbability of terrorist strikes doesn’t make them less contemptible, but the statistics highlight a huge disparity between political fear mongering and reality.
In a “Great Stagnation” when only 26.7 percent Americans believe the United States is on the right track, it is only natural that people are especially vulnerable to fear and distrust of their neighbors. There is no contradiction, however, between loathing the horrors of abduction, disease and terrorism and refusing to be scared in our daily interactions with each other. As we face the violence that proliferates on cable news and in the headlines of this newspaper, we would all be wise to heed the words of Vice President Lampkin in response to the tragic death of University student Connor Cormier: “Reach out to one another in kindness, support and the sense of community that help us face difficult times together.”
Gray Whisnant is an Opinion Columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at g.whisnant@cavalierdaily.com.
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