Writing for Salon.com, pilot Patrick Smith makes some excellent points about the breathless paranoia we now display about terrorism:
What has become of us? Are we really in such a confused and panicked state that a person haplessly walking through the wrong door can disrupt air travel nationwide, resulting in mass evacuations and long delays? “The terrorists have won” is one of those waggish catch-alls that normally annoy me, but all too often it seems that way. Our reactionary, self-defeating behavior has put much at stake — our time, our tax dollars and our liberties.
…
In fact, over the five-year span between 1985 and 1989 we can count at least six high-profile terrorist attacks against commercial planes or airports. In addition to those above were the horrific bombings of Pan Am 103 and UTA 772, the bombing of an Air India 747 over the North Atlantic that killed 329 people, and the saga of TWA Flight 847.
…
Here in this proclaimed new “age of terrorism,” we act as if the clock began ticking on Sept. 11, 2001. In truth we’ve been dealing with this stuff for decades. Not only in the 1980s, but throughout the ’60s and ’70s as well. Acts of piracy and sabotage are far fewer today.
Imagine the Karachi attack happening tomorrow. Imagine TWA 847 happening tomorrow. Imagine six successful terror attacks against commercial aviation in a five-year span. The airline industry would be paralyzed, the populace frozen in abject fear. It would be a catastrophe of epic proportion — of wall-to-wall coverage and, dare I suggest, the summary surrender of important civil liberties.
What is it about us, as a nation, that has made us so unable to remember, and unable to cope?
The message is similar to that of the excellent essay “Milksop Nation,” which won an Economist essay contest in 2002. Namely, that we do a poor job individually of assessing risks. We obsess over rare risks in which malicious actors want to do us harm, and we downplay common risks that are enormously more likely to injure or kill us. Worse, our political systems amplify our fears to the point of absurdity.
One thing we certainly need are people with the clear-sightedness and bravery to point out that we are fearful about the wrong things, and that we have real, pressing problems that we ought to be concentrating on instead.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Pie attack on fisheries minister an act of terror: Liberal MP
Canwest News Service Published: Tuesday, January 26, 2010
OTTAWA — An incident in which the federal fisheries minister was hit with a pie by a seal hunt protester should be seen as a terrorist act, says a Liberal MP.
Gerry Byrne made the comment to Newfoundland radio station VOCM after Gail Shea was hit in the face Monday by an American animal-rights activist, unhappy with Canada’s seal hunt.
New York City resident Emily McCoy, 37, a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is charged with assault.
Mr. Byrne told VOCM the government should investigate the incident based on the definition of a terrorist act under the law in Canada.
Here is a perfect example of misplaced risk assessment:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100127095932.htm
People would rather fetishize remote dangers than recognize and combat those that are real and close to home and demand change or sacrifice.
The more that the evidence piles up, in scientific research and in Joe Plumber’s and Sarah Palin’s backyards, that climate change is a real threat, the more frantically they deny.
What about H1N1 virus? Did we not over-react just a little bit? Our media is certainly culpable in setting fear in our minds and exploiting this frailty to make money.
That was discussed here previously. I am personally of two minds about it. Initially, the H1N1 flu seemed to have quite a high mortality rate. While the initial fears may not have been justified, the aggressive action taken to develop and promote the vaccine may have been justified by the danger as it was perceived at the time.
Good comment from this pilot.
“We have nothing to fear, but fear itself” FDR
And the media seems destined to propogate it.
I lament the prevailing practice of driving children to school to prevent their abduction. The consequence is that we deny the child the confidence to take those steps, meet those friends and yes occasionally cope with a situation that may require some good judgement.
We should also excercise a prudent response, and not a panicked response, to such events as a terrorist (or attempted terrorist) attack.
A starting point may be for the media to look at matters with a wider as opposed to a narrow sensationalist lens.
Terrorism Derangement Syndrome
The GOP’s scare tactics work so well because the public is terrified already.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2010, at 6:41 PM ET
America has slid back again into its own special brand of terrorism-derangement syndrome. Each time this condition recurs, it presents with more acute and puzzling symptoms. It’s almost impossible to identify the cause, and it’s doubtful there’s a cure. The entire forensic team from House would need a full season to unravel the mystery of what it is about the American brain that renders us more terrified of terrorists today than we were five years ago and less trusting of government policies to protect us.
The real problem is that too many people tend to follow GOP cues about how hopelessly unsafe America is, and they’ve yet again convinced themselves that we are mere seconds away from an attack. Moreover, each time Republicans go to their terrorism crazy-place, they go just a little bit farther than they did the last time, so that things that made us feel safe last year make us feel vulnerable today.
Policies and practices that were perfectly acceptable just after 9/11, or when deployed by the Bush administration, are now decried as dangerous and reckless. The same prominent Republicans who once celebrated open civilian trials for Zacarias Moussaoui and Richard Reid, the so-called “shoe bomber,” now claim that open civilian trials endanger Americans (some Republicans have now even gone so far as to try to defund such trials). Republicans who once supported closing Guantanamo are now fighting to keep it open. And one GOP senator, who like all members of Congress must take an oath to uphold the Constitution, has voiced his concern that the Christmas bomber really needed to be “properly interrogated” instead of being allowed to ask for a lawyer.
“This week Glenn Greenwald summarized how far the goal posts of normal have moved when he pointed out that “merely advocating what Ronald Reagan explicitly adopted as his policy—’to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law against’ terrorists—is now the exclusive province of civil liberties extremists.” Upon being elected to the U. S. Senate last month, Scott Brown declared: “Our Constitution and laws exist to protect this nation—they do not grant rights and privileges to enemies in wartime. In dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them.” As Adam Serwer observed, “This is the new normal for Republicans: You can be denied rights not through due process of law but merely based on the nature of the crime you are suspected of committing. Brown’s rhetorical framing, that jettisoning the legal system we’ve had for 200-plus years represents ‘tradition’ while granting suspected criminals the right to legal counsel represents liberalism gone mad.”"
I got the following email yesterday and it’s been cracking me up ever since. It’s not just terrorists that Americans fetishize. It’s a lot of other ridiculous safety issues involving germs and bicycle helmets and child molesters. Maybe I should send out my own chain email warning like this one only have a picture of an automobile spewing exhaust instead of a socket burnt from an air freshener! Here’s the message (cue ominous music from Hitchcock score…)
Please pass this one along to your family and friends..
This photo was taken at the scene of a house fire that occurred recently. I’ve never heard this info before…
House fires – please read !!!!!
Received from a friend who is in the insurance property business. It is well worth reading.
This is one of those e-mails that if you don’t send it, rest assured someone on your list will suffer for not reading it. The original message was written by a lady whose brother and wife learned a hard lesson recently.
Their house burnt down.. nothing left but ashes. They have good insurance so the house will be replaced and most of the contents. That is the good news.
However, they were sick when they found out the cause of the fire. The insurance investigator sifted through the ashes for several hours. He had the cause of the fire traced to the master bathroom. He asked her sister-in-law what she had plugged in the bathroom. She listed the normal things…curling iron, blow dryer.
He kept saying to her, ‘No, this would be something that would disintegrate at high temperatures’. Then her sister-in-law remembered she had a Glade Plug-In, in the bathroom.
The investigator had one of those ‘Aha’ moments. He said that was the cause of the fire. He said he has seen more house fires started with the plug-in type room fresheners than anything else. He said the plastic they are made from is THIN. He also said that in every case there was nothing left to prove that it even existed. When the investigator looked in the wall plug, the two prongs left from the plug-in were still in there.
Her sister-in-law had one of the plug-ins that had a small night light built in it. She said she had noticed that the light would dim and then finally go out. She would walk in to the bathroom a few hours later, and the light would be back on again. The investigator said that the unit was getting too hot, and would dim and go out rather than just blow the light bulb. Once it cooled down it would come back on….. That is a warning sign
The investigator said he personally wouldn’t have any type of plug in fragrance device anywhere in his house. He has seen too many places that have been burned down due to them.
PLEASE PASS THIS ON TO ALL THE PEOPLE IN YOUR ADDRESS BOOK.
NOT ONLY COULD IT SAVE SOMEONE’S HOUSE, BUT IT COULD SAVE SOMEONE’S LIFE
Obama Challenges Terrorism Critics
By PETER BAKER
Published: February 7, 2010
WASHINGTON — The White House pushed back Sunday against Republican criticism of its approach to terrorism, calling it “not anchored in reality” as a national security debate that was largely muted in recent years roared back to center stage with an angry intensity.
After a week of sustained attacks led by former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska and a host of Congressional Republicans, President Obama and his aides argued that they were handling terror suspects much as the previous administration did, dismissing Republican complaints as politically motivated.
“The most important thing for the public to understand is we’re not handling any of these cases any different than the Bush administration handled them all through 9/11,” Mr. Obama told CBS News on Sunday. “They prosecuted 190 folks in these Article Three courts,” he added, referring to civilian courts. “Got convictions. And those folks are in maximum security prisons right now. And there have been no escapes.”
“There is a general agreement about risk, then, in the established regulatory practices of several developed countries: risks are deemed unacceptable if the annual fatality risk is higher than 1 in 10,000 or perhaps higher than 1 in 100,000 and acceptable if the figure is lower than 1 in 1 million or 1 in 2 million. Between these two ranges is an area in which risk might be considered “tolerable.”
These established considerations are designed to provide a viable, if somewhat rough, guideline for public policy. In all cases, measures and regulations intended to reduce risk must satisfy essential cost-benefit considerations. Clearly, hazards that fall in the unacceptable range should command the most attention and resources. Those in the tolerable range may also warrant consideration — but since they are less urgent, they should be combated with relatively inexpensive measures. Those hazards in the acceptable range are of little, or even negligible, concern, so precautions to reduce their risks even further would scarcely be worth pursuing unless they are remarkably inexpensive.
[...]
As can be seen, annual terrorism fatality risks, particularly for areas outside of war zones, are less than one in one million and therefore generally lie within the range regulators deem safe or acceptable, requiring no further regulations, particularly those likely to be expensive. They are similar to the risks of using home appliances (200 deaths per year in the United States) or of commercial aviation (103 deaths per year). Compared with dying at the hands of a terrorist, Americans are twice as likely to perish in a natural disaster and nearly a thousand times more likely to be killed in some type of accident. The same general conclusion holds when the full damage inflicted by terrorists — not only the loss of life but direct and indirect economic costs — is aggregated. As a hazard, terrorism, at least outside of war zones, does not inflict enough damage to justify substantially increasing expenditures to deal with it.”