Remember in the fall of 2001, when every leader on both sides of the aisle were telling us not to change our daily routines by one iota, or else the terrorists have won? Who cares if we're fighting an expensive war...if we don't follow through with these ridiculous tax cuts for the rich, the terrorists have won! If you don't spend as much this Christmas as you did last year, the terrorists have won! Well don't look now, but, even though it's been almost five years since the last terrorist attack on American soil, we're still letting it dictate our lives.
Daniel Nexon has a post up at Lawyers, Guns and Money regarding the overriding fear in most Americans that the terrorists are reading the newspapers daily to figure out what they're going to attack next...the line of thinking found here:
The media do a beautiful job of telling terrorists all about America's weaknesses. I am sure the terrorists have so much information from the media on points to strike the United States that they have a hard time deciding which location to strike first.
Nexon then goes on to link to a document from John Mueller which apparently expresses far too much common sense to be taken seriously. As you see from the post, Mueller works with six main propositions:
1. Terrorism generally has only limited direct effects
2. The costs of terrorism very often come mostly from the fear and consequent reaction (or overreaction) it characteristically inspires
3. The terrorism industry is a major part of the terrorism problem
4. Policies designed to deal with terrorism should focus more on reducing fear and anxiety as inexpensively as possible than on objectively reducing the rather limited dangers terrorism is likely actually to pose
5. Doing nothing (or at least refraining from overreacting) after a terrorist attack is not necessarily unacceptable
6. Despite U.S. overreaction, the campaign against terror is generally going rather well
While I love #'s 2 and 5 on this list, the one I think is most important is #1. It just baffles me that more people can't put 2 and 2 together on this. How many Americans does AIDS kill in a given year? Cancer? Alzheimer's? Car wrecks? Hell, boating accidents? I don't know exact figures, but I think you know as well as I do that they all (aside from maybe the last one) kill FAR more people in an average year than terrorism. Yes, it sucks to feel like you're helpless against the violence of others' extremism, but you're also helpless against the wrecklessness (and potential violent impact) of others' driving habits, and yet most of us drive somewhere every day without hesitation. And yet we let terrorism dominate every part of our domestic (and foreign) policy despite its overall small impact on our lives.
Every time I go back to Oklahoma, I talk to friends (whom I love and respect) who go on and on about terrorism and the fact that we're "at war". We're at war with an abstraction (the War on Drugs was more easy to define than this), and aside from the growing odds that somebody from our town (or worse, somebody we know) will die or be seriously wounded (physically or mentally) in Iraq/Afghanistan, this omnipresent "war" has no impact on our daily lives...other than the fact that there is no money available for research of diseases that might affect us someday and there aren't any good jobs available.
Anyway, read Mueller's document (not to mention the responses to Nexon's post). It's good stuff.
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