- Oral Content
- Topic: Terrorism
- Purpose: Showcase the fear that has driven people to stereotype and criminalize innocent people
- Thesis Statement: The underlying fear citizens have that the United States will be subject to another 9/11 terrorist attack is damaging our relations with foreign countries and with the people in these countries. We, as a nation, need to conquer this fear by confronting it head on and taking the bold steps that actually address the issue rather than the idea.
- Introduction
- Attention Strategy/Orienting Material: Begin by playing a video of the intro theme of the show “Fear Factor”, a show that centered around contestants facing their fears both physically and mentally for a monetary prize
- Although this showcases an extreme dramatization of people’s fears in the form of entertainment, we all, as people, biologically fear certain things such as spiders, heights, death, rollercoasters, clowns, etc.
- Raise the question: When has the last time any of you have confronted your fears? When has our government?
- Although this showcases an extreme dramatization of people’s fears in the form of entertainment, we all, as people, biologically fear certain things such as spiders, heights, death, rollercoasters, clowns, etc.
- Attention Strategy/Orienting Material: Begin by playing a video of the intro theme of the show “Fear Factor”, a show that centered around contestants facing their fears both physically and mentally for a monetary prize
- Body
- Main Idea: Through fear we dismiss and avoid our true problems, but when we conquer them, or at the least confront them, we are able to
- Support: Northwestern University Phobia Research
- Specific Support: After exposing participants who had a severe phobia of spiders to a tarantula for an interactive two-hour session, researchers found that just this one positive exposure to the spider had lasting effects in these people with arachnophobia for six months
- Specific Support: According to one of the key researchers, the success was in result of “this idea that you slowly approach the thing you’re afraid of.”
- “They learned that the spider was predictable and controllable, and by that time, they feel like it’s not a spider anymore.”
- Specific Support: The study sheds light on the brain responses to fear and the changes that happen when a fear is overcome
- Support: Northwestern University Phobia Research
- Main Idea: Letting fear overtake our whole beings and our policies in government is preventing us from advancement
- Support: TED Talk by Jonathan Tepperman “The risky politics of progress”
- Specific Support: Canada becoming one of the world’s most welcoming, immigration-friendly nations today, after it abandoned its explicitly racist immigration policy
- Specific Support: Indonesia, which suffered a bigger problem involving Islamic extremism, was able to reduce terrorism and radical groups to unimaginable numbers
- By focusing on things like reducing poverty and cutting corruption they were able to steal the Islamists’ thunder
- They also cracked down hard on terrorism, by learning that repression only creates more extremism
- Support: TED Talk by Jonathan Tepperman “The risky politics of progress”
- Main Idea: Through fear we dismiss and avoid our true problems, but when we conquer them, or at the least confront them, we are able to
- Conclusion
- Concluding Remark: As Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” We may be afraid now, but if we harness this fear in a positive, motivating way we can take the bold steps to address the issue that is terrorism
- Visual Content
- Slide One
- “Fear Factor” Intro theme video on YouTube
- Slide Two
- Collage of pictures with common fears
- Slide Three and all the slides following
- (Still deciding)
- Slide One
TED Outline Format
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