Are We Just A Little Too Paranoid?

Since 911 a lot has changed in the good ole U.S. of A.
For instance let one of our so-called super intelligence
agencies say that a terrorist group is going to down
an American airliner using marshmellows. Watch
and see the FAA bans carrying marshmellows on any
flight having any stop or flying over this country.

Right after 911 the FAA banned so many items from
carry on luggage that you may as well as just not
carried on any luggage at all. I recently had a friend
that was told by Homeland Security that she no
longer existed when she went to get a replacement
social security card. She is still trying to prove to
Homeland that she does exist. Anyway read the article
I stumbled across and shoot me your thoughts.


Upon discovering that Weeki Wachee Springs, his Florida roadside water park, had been included on the Department of Homeland Security's list of over 80,000 potential terrorist targets, its marketing and promotion manager, John Athanason, turned reflective. "I can't imagine bin Laden trying to blow up the mermaids," he mused, "but with terrorists, who knows what they're thinking. I don't want to think like a terrorist, but what if the terrorists try to poison the water at Weeki Wachee Springs?"

Whatever his imaginings, however, he went on to report that his enterprise had quickly and creatively risen to the occasion - or seized the opportunity. They were working to get a chunk of the counterterrorism funds allocated to the region by the well-endowed, anxiety-provoking, ever-watchful Department of Homeland Security.

Which is the greater threat: terrorism, or our reaction against it? The Weeki Wachee experience illustrates the problem. A threat that is real but likely to prove to be of limited scope has been massively, perhaps even fancifully, inflated to produce widespread and unjustified anxiety. This process has then led to wasteful, even self-parodic expenditures and policy overreactions, ones that not only very often do more harm and cost more money than anything the terrorists have accomplished, but play into their hands.

The way terrorism anxiety has come to envelop the nation is also illustrated by a casual exchange on television's 60 Minutes. In an interview, filmmaker-provocateur Michael Moore happened to remark, "The chances of any of us dying in a terrorist incident is very, very, very small," and his interviewer, Bob Simon, promptly admonished, "But no one sees the world like that." Remarkably, both statements are true - the first only a bit more so than the second. It is the thesis of this book that our reaction against terrorism has caused more harm than the threat warrants - not just to civil liberties, not just to the economy, but even to human lives.

And our reaction has often helped the terrorists more than it has hurt them. It is the reactive consequences stemming from Simon's perspective - or from what journalist Mark Bowden has characterized as "housewives in Iowa ... watching TV afraid that al-Qaeda's going to charge in their front door" - that generate one of the chief problems presented by terrorism.




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