As observed in Bruce Schneier’s blog, we are running into the grand problem that the terrorists are winning because our society is acquiescing to their attacks.
The terrorists don’t necessarily care if people get killed; blowing things up, killing people, and such, are merely tactics to a goal. The goal is that they want us filled with terror, and that’s what’s happening. When we are fearful, they have succeeded.
America has had the moniker “Land of the Free, and Home of the Brave” – the responses to terrorism are smashing away at both of those. This isn’t to say that there aren’t brave people; the handling, by police, emergency services, and the military demonstrate that they have plenty of men and women that are plenty brave.
The trouble isn’t a lack of brave people to cope with emergencies. The trouble is that the rest of the people are getting fearful and panicked. That is leading to ridiculous results, going as bad as the recent airboard mutiny, where passengers, suspicious about a couple of passengers that they thought may have spoken Arabic, left the plane, refusing to fly until security personnel removed the “offending” passengers.
This was, in reality, a case of not-terribly-latent racism, combining with incompetent suspicion and paranoia, preying on the fears that people are not refusing to accept. The “aviation expert” observed that “We are in a paranoid time, but vigilance by ordinary people is important.” I disagree – this situation demonstrated that the paranoid vigilance of incompetent ordinary people causes real problems.
There were complaints after the incident of the “underpants bomber” that President Obama did not do enough soon enough; it seems to me that he should have consciously waited a while, so as to demonstrate a refusal to be drawn into a panicked response, and then emit a speech including the following sorts of points:
- Happily, security preparations were good enough that this particular incident did not go very badly.
- Unfortunately, as there are an unlimited number of possible targets, it is effectively impossible to secure them all, as hard as our fine people may try.
- The goal of terrorists is to instill terror – whether there is destruction is incidental. If we, as a people, are shaken by this incident, then they have succeeded, even though there was no death or destruction. The successful injury to our spirit represents success to them.
- We must not minimize the hurt to the individuals injured by terrorist events – we must help and support them.
- But we must not allow the possibility of injury to destroy our spirit. When the American people succumb to the fear mongering that was the goal of the terrorist, we commit three errors:
- As a nation, we allow them to succeed
- We injure ourselves. The cost of wasted time that results from some of the panicked reactions has been enormous, and the time wasted can never be regained.
- We dishonor the efforts and preparations of our armed forces when we panic
There’s a pretty awesome blog entry on this here. The awesome quote:
This is seldom highlighted in a country perversely convulsed by, and that can’t seem to get enough of, fantasies about being besieged by terrorists.
“This” being that about the only thing that didn’t cause more fatalities than terrorism was shark attacks. And yes, indeed, the popularity of the TV show “24″ demonstrates the fixation on this fantasy. Things that regularly cause vastly more fatalities than terrorism include:
- Alcohol whether via
- Alcohol poisoning
- Fatal injuries resulting from intoxication
- Violent deaths stemming from the recent economic troubles, whether due to
- Job loss
- Foreclosure
- Inability to pay rent
- E Coli bacteria
- Car accidents
- Airplane crashes due to
- Pilot error
- Inclement weather
- Structural failure
- Improper maintenance
Republicans seem happy to find any reason they can fabricate to say that Obama is a bad president; I think that the fact that he didn’t make a firm statement about this situation points to him being weak. It is possible to work past weakness, but it requires effort…