ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the Cambridge and Duvall stories to demonstrate how policy solutions can be derailed by media coverage, public fear, and partisanship sustained in professional communication and public discourse. It illuminates the public and legislative demand for controlling perceived risks during three kairotic cycles of debate about civil commitment. The chapter extends Crowley and Hawhee's ideas about the "mutability of rhetoric" and the notion that stakeholders may become interested and then disinterested in an issue, as they considers how these moments may form cycles in which the resolution of an issue might become stymied or even impossible, especially when perceptions of risk lead to moral panic within the public arena. The chapter explains kairos as an opportunity that a rhetor can occupy for advantage in responding to a social or political controversy, the sociological concept of moral panic necessarily complicates kairotic rhetoric.
