Jones Alley
roasted nuts
Today marks two weeks that our embarrassment of a free press have been hyperventilating over the failed attempt of a confused and uncommitted child to bring down an American airliner but only succeeding in fricasseeing his junk, and still nobody seems to grasp that when you get right down to it, nothing happened. Well, except for the kid's nutsack going up in smoke.
If this is the best that Al Qaeda can do, shouldn't we consider renaming the people behind it "errorists" and quit letting them control our emotions?
If this is the best that Al Qaeda can do, shouldn't we consider renaming the people behind it "errorists" and quit letting them control our emotions?
posted by Milo Johnson at 5:01 AM
8 Comments:
That's a pretty big if! Wow.
But such a beautiful "if" though, too. A hopeful if. I hope I live in that world! Where that if would prove true. Just thinking about it, makes me feel better about the world.
I also hope that they don't put people like you and me in charge of security.
It's hard to know what to believe. Something I read yesterday on salon.com made it seem almost inevitable and natural that an ever-more-competent and alarmingly well-educated succession of suicide attackers might be motivated to kill any of us, on arguably perfectly defensible grounds.
It's hard to know what to believe. But I don't let it control my emotions in the slightest.
Even if there are more suicide attackers, it's still extremely unlikely that the casualties they cause would even begin to approach the level of auto accidents, firearm deaths, and domestic assaults that we seem to consider as a "normal" baseline in our daily existence. I can't see the spate of terrorism being any more than the kind of "nuisance" (not to minimize the deaths and injuries that would be involved) that we already see and accept in other countries.
That's an excellent point. Even terrorism's most spectacular successes have been relatively insignificant! They'd need to sneak a 9/11 past us every month just to come close to auto deaths.
How come Obama doesn't step up to the podium and emphasize this point? It'd be one a hell of an attitude corrective. Like: "hey terrorists, do your worst - it's just a drop in the bucket for us! Business as usual! Boo yah!" Even the nightmare scenario where they smuggle-in-a-nuke - that's not going to stop the U.S.A. Just look at pics of Hiroshima today - vibrant!
Thanks again for the corrective. Too bad the main people in charge don't put out that message. It makes me feel cynical, as if they're not in the business of reassuring us.
Although still...probably we don't want people like you and me in charge of security.
There's a reason they call it "terrorism" and not "destructionism" or "mass-murderism." It's designed for maximum effect from minimum investment. Think about it, nineteen crazies and a half-dozen boxcutters, plus the price of airline tickets and a few hours of flight lessons, and here we are nearly ten years later still wetting ourselves as a country and poorer by several trillion dollars. How much harder do they really need to work right now to achieve their desired effect when they are still reaping the rewards of the last time?
I get all that, and have gotten it. What surprises me just now is that there seem few to no attempts at an official or public policy level to put its real impact in perspective. Once you think about it - it's so obvious the scale is out of proportion.
But terrorism is far from a unique case. Any time a group of people die in some incident or accident, it's all hysterics and "who's to blame" - what could have been done, what was done wrong.
I guess it would come off as inconsiderate to relatives of the victims to strike any tone approaching "no big deal." Particularly in the nuke scenario: "no big deal, this city will be rebuilt and vibrant in 50 years" wouldn't be likely to get anybody elected in the meantime.
"Once you think about it - it's so obvious the scale is out of proportion. "
- and what I mean by that is, thanks again for pointing that out. It really is incredibly obvious. I did a little googling, I guess tons of people do point that out but I don't normally read around in those news chat groups.
And it looks like the ensuing terror is as much use to American politicians as it is to the people who planned and executed it, and that is why nobody is addressing it that way. Orwell 101.
Yeah. We're working hand in hand to strike the desired tone for whatever they want to do. Sucks.
Still, that's pretty much what the media and government do non-stop on any troubling issue: whip it up, whip it up. Use the hysteria to sell advertising / justify maximum allocation of resources.
Why when you look at it, we're not serving their needs, so much as they're serving ours!
But we're really not serving our needs.
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