Keeping Fear of Terrorism in Perspective – And Putting Reasoning Back Into Our Decision Making Processes

Are you tired of being scared? Maybe a little perspective would help?

Do you fear dying from heart disease?  700,142  Americans were kill by it in 2001.

Do you fear dying from cancer?   553,768  Americans were kill by it in 2001.

Do you fear dying from an accident of any kind?  101,537  Americans were killed accidentally in 2001.

Do you fear dying from suicide?  30,622  Americans took their own lives in 2001.

Do you fear the loss of a infant?  27,801 infants died in 2001.

Do you fear dying from homicide?  17,330 Americans were murdered in 2001.

Do you fear dying from a work injury?  5,431  Americans were died at work in 2001.

Do you fear dying from drowning?  3,247  Americans drowned in 2001.

If we don’t fear most of these causes of death, then why should we fear dying at the hands of a terrorist. It is less likely than any of the above. On the other hand, if we are in a state of fear due to the constant drumbeat from the authoritarians in the Republican party, how reasoned are any decisions we might make?

Luke Mitchell wrote an article back in March 2004, the last time fear was used by the Republican authoritarians to short circuit our brains. Luke Mitchell began his article with this, “Terror, like ecstasy, tends to magnify perceptions. Just as affection becomes adoration in the physical act of love, so too does vigilance sometimes become morbid obsession in the face of spectacular violence. To be effective, this normal function of survival must also be temporary. It is now more than two years since our own national incident of spectacular violence, however, and although the United States remains obsessed, it is not unfair, or even insensitive, to begin considering the events of September 11 from a more detached perspective.” (Mitchell’s article provided the above statistics.)

In the “Legitimizing Authoritarian Conservatism: The Ugly Politics of Fear” section of his book Conservatives Without Conscience, John Dean concluded with, “In short, fear takes reasoning out of the decision-making process, which our history has shown us often enough can have dangerous and long-lasting consequences.  If Americans cannot engage in analytical thinking as a result of Republicans’ using fear for their own political purposes, we are all in serious trouble.  I am sure I am not alone in worrying about the road that we are now on, and where the current authoritarianism is taking the country.  I only wish other people would talk about it.”

Ted Galen Carpenter of the CATO Institute, put it this way, “Compared to the lethal menaces of the twentieth century, the strategic threat posed by radical Islamic terrorists is minor league. On September 11th, 2001, the terrorists killed some 3,000 people, and subsequent attacks in Bali, Madrid, Istanbul, London and Mumbai have killed hundreds more. Tragic as those deaths are, they pale in comparison to the nearly 100 million deaths of the two world wars.”

Our job, according to Bruce Schneier of Wired magazine,

is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. … Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show’s viewership.

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn’t make us any safer.

Please keep the fear of terrorism in perspective and think about doing what is best for this country and keeping us from being scared into a single-party authoritarian state.