Proximity to danger does not make people politically active.

Evidence

Every twenty minutes or so a nuclear battleship slipped by. But when I asked Lisa and Carolyn whether they had ever thought about getting involved in doing something about the battleships or the oil spills, they both said, in separate interviews, that those issues were not close to home,'' and did not really touch” them personally. And they both said, in almost identical words, “and anyway, what would I do, bomb the place?” referring to the chemical plant and the weapons base. Carolyn said it twice. Instead they were both involved in the antidrugs group. — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”, 20

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates the folk meaning of ‘close to home’ as felt personal salience, not geographic distance.
• XREF: Connects to cognitive reframing and issue-framing literatures (works like Snow & Benford on framing, or risk-perception work of Slovic). — connects to: Intellectual conviction alone does not make people act on danger — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 317
• corroborated: 5 independent passages support this claim — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”: The work of avoiding…, 20

Related

• Volunteers classify nearby catastrophic hazards as ‘not close to home’ (similarity 0.82)
• People choose political issues they judge close and doable. (similarity 0.82)
• Everyday political avoidance is active communicative work, not mere apathy (similarity 0.80)
• Proximity to local danger is diffused by the option of simply leaving (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Intellectual conviction alone does not make people act on danger #expands (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 317