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Assignment 13

Emotions of love, hate, and fear are extremely powerful and are the root to some of the most tragic stories of American history. In her article,”Affective Economies”, Sara Ahmed draws from these tragic examples and explains how love and hate are interrelated and misunderstood, between victims and their perpetrators. Her beginning excerpt from the Aryan Nations web site begins her explanation and position of how some people only see hate, however the individual or individuals act out of love. It is as if she wants the reader to have a sense of compassion for the perpetrator because for them it was done out of love and for a purpose to preserver this love. The terrorist from the 9/11 attacks in New York City, acted out of love of their religion and God, of which they believed they had the rights and grounds to do so. For Americans however, these acts were hateful and done without grounds and definitely had no rights, Sara explains how fear is the root to these emotions. Former president George W. Bush, had addressed saying how the future of America would not be one of fear or terror, rather by using the love American’s have for their country it is grounds to preserver and move along without fear or terror. Then he declared war and the this fear and terror was projected towards American citizens so that could feel that they had the rights and grounds to go to war. I think that there was a lot more to this than Americans tend to believe. The media used this fear from the terror attacks to keep Americans afraid of anyone who was affiliated with the ethnicity or religion. The media introduced a new color system that used red, orange, yellow, blue, and green which was intended to alert the intensity of terror, basically it showed how afraid Americans were supposed to be, with red being the highest and then lowering respectively. Again demonstrating how emotions are relative to the rights and grounds of the nation and how fear was used to deter from the fact that the country was at war.