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A terrorist under every bed?
'The FBI issued a fresh warning Saturday that terrorists may be interested in using small planes to carry out suicide attacks.I'd like to issue my own warning. The events of terrorism and, much more important, the mechanics of it and the workings of the structure behind it, are of utmost importance to us all today. They are much more important than Anna Kournikova's breasts or other appurtenances, who killed Chandra, or Winona LaDuke's opinion on most anything. But there's another extreme to which we can go, and that's to panic over non-existent, hypothetical threats, or unlikely threats, or to take the legitimate wariness the threat of terrorism induces, turn it into outright fear and then wear it like a bucket over the national head. Take an entire evening and a 12-pack, and anyone with a three-digit IQ can come up with probably a hundred ways terrorists might kill or maim large numbers of us. Of that hundred ways, the Bad Guys have probably throught of somewhere between three and ten in their own bull sessions, and of another 90 or 97 that we didn't. Guarding against the likely makes good sense. Guarding against the unlikely is a waste of resources that could be spent on better things, like beer. Making political points by hollering "what-did-he-know-and-when-did-he-know-it" is cheap and tawdry and should be punished with the National Finger. And issuing a warning a day about everything from Cessnas full of dynamite to frogmen to exploding apartment complexes dulls the nation's willingness to listen when there really is a wolf. Posted by: Fred Pruitt 2002-05-26 |
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