Sorted: Spreading Fear on the Underground

 I came across this poster on the London Underground and again in Brixton last weekend. What an unwelcome addition to the “SEE IT, SAY IT, SORTED” fear-mongering advert that has for the past few years been broadcast every five minutes over the tannoys in UK railway stations. As though we haven’t already had enough suspicion and anxiety spread by this toxic campaign, now someone in the transport-sphere has taken it to a new medium so we can become afraid through our eyes as well as ears.

The poster blatantly instructs us to be alert to dangerous people. Treated as children, the implication is that we must forsake our intuition and humanity, and take zero responsibility for assessing a situation by ourselves. Instead, we are to report any out-of-the-norm behaviour to “a grownup”, who will “SORT IT” on our behalf.

We needn’t even go to the trouble of speaking to an actual person, which potentially would mean having to explain ourselves, but instead can choose to alert the authorities by text, and this further removes us from the potential harm our (propaganda enhanced) paranoia may cause others.

Notable also is the non-caucasian appearance of the “dangerous” person lurking menacingly in the foreground, but this is a subject for a different post – my own fear of strangers extends to all skin colour.

How this poster campaign is cranking up a “fear one another” narrative is also in the language: The tannoy announcement is less overt about what we should be afraid of – “If you see something that doesn’t look right…” – so the source of anxiety could be a thing or a person. Whereas the poster directs us fully to people – “someone”, not “something”.

Is it about terrorism? I don’t underestimate the horror of terror – but this is not a way to combat it. Having lived in Israel my first two decades, I know something of the psychological harm to individuals and damage to society of being in a more or less constant state of alert to such danger – and have written about this in my novel Night Swimming in the Jordan.

What this poster boils down to is more “fear porn” designed to make us needlessly averse to each other, especially where the other or their behaviour is different. I hope we can resist this move to erode our solidarity and our communities, so we can preserve ourselves and preserve our humanity.