Word: panic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Once the first cases of anthrax exposure appeared in Florida and the envelope became a potential weapon of mass destruction, we got to see what panic looks like. On Tuesday an office worker in suburban Virginia settled down on a toilet seat, yanked off a piece of double-ply toilet paper and found a message written between the leaves: "You're sitting in anthrax, and you're dead." The investigators rushed in: false alarm. The Nashville, Tenn., haz-mat team was called out five times in 48 hours, all for hoaxes. A woman phoned in a report that her computer...
...these attacks--real and false--were directed at media companies. Having attacked America's financial and military centers on Sept. 11, the al-Qaeda terror network might well be tempted to hit the nation's media--which manage to embody both freedom and excess. Is al-Qaeda trying to panic U.S. journalists into doing the terrorists' work for them, spreading the fear that has now hit them where they work? Addressing the possibility that the anthrax scare is a follow-up to the attack on the World Trade Center, Vice President Dick Cheney wondered aloud, "Are they related...
...focus here is cockeyed; it is not fear that one should fear--not fear itself. It is panic, which is the fear of the shapeless, of the enemy without uniform, the front without a front. The unspecificity of the FBI's warning tends to incite panic--so darkly imaginative does the mind become when it attempts to embrace the unembraceable. Cervantes said "fear is sharp-sighted, and can see things underground, and much more in the skies." He was really referring to that transitional state when fear, which is a sober and potentially useful attitude, becomes something out of control...
...asked an Israeli, Professor Moshe Halbertal, who is visiting at the University of Pennsylvania law school, how we Americans should be dealing with our sudden unwanted education. And he told me that the way to prevent fear from becoming panic is to hold onto one's sense of order in the face of the chaos the terrorist seeks to create. "Panic is unspecified, untargeted anxiety," he said, "not channeled to place and time. The terrorist seeks to be unspecific to place and time, even to his own enmity. He wants to make everyone appear the enemy." This...
...speak of things "not specific to target" may have been necessary, but it is the stuff of panic nonetheless. A dozen, two dozen more terrorist attacks would not injure the country as much as that...