On a personal level, we may begin that we tend toward experiencing inordinate fear in our personal lives if we tend to catastrophize about events in our personal lives that we do not like. It is hard to learn how to accept certain admittedly frustrating events in our personal lives and NOT catastrophize about them. By definition, we would prefer NOT to have had those admittedly frustrating events beset us in our personal lives.
Should we somehow manage to learn NOT to catastrophize about such admittedly frustrating events in our personal lives, we might express our preferences NOT to have experienced them in ways that do not involve exaggeration and catastrophizing about the events at hand.
However, even when we are able to recognize that we tend to catastrophize, it is not always easy to learn how to stop this tendency and move toward expressing one's preferences about the situation at hand instead.
But movement conservatism actually encourages people to catastrophize about certain kinds of events in our larger American political and economic and cultural mix. In this way, movement conservatism builds on and encourages rage-aholics.
At times, verbal rage-aholics can be tempted to act out their rage by taking violent action.
At times, even progressive and liberal opponents of rage-aholics in movement conservatism may be tempted to become rage-aholics themselves in opposition.
But the young Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., preferred in the 1950s and 1960s to preach and practice non-violent action to express outrage about racial injustices. No doubt media coverage, and especially television coverage, of the brutal police tactics against Dr. King's black civil rights protesters in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 helped engender white outrage about the police tactics.
Tragically, Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
Tragically, Dr. King's assassination was followed by riots in certain cities across the country.
In addition, the police riot in Chicago at the time of the 1968 Democratic Party Convention there was widely reported by the media.
No doubt the media coverage of the police riot in Chicago in 1968 helped the conservative Republican Party candidate win the 1968 presidential election.
Unfortunately, movement conservatism capitalized on those admittedly different riots to fan understandable fear in white folks.
In short, media coverage of certain kinds of police violence tends to play into the hands of the fear-mongers in movement conservatism.
However, in general, the fear-mongers in movement conservatism have used anti-60s rhetoric to advance movement conservatism, as Philip Jenkins shows in his book DECADE OF NIGHTMARES: THE END OF THE SIXTIES AND THE MAKING OF THE EIGHTIES (2006).
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