By Tom Kando
Since April 15, I have been wondering whether to add my voice to the cacophony about the Boston Marathon bombing on Patriots’ Day, and if so, do I have anything original to add? Well, I have found my angle. Taking a big risk, I am going to argue that this terrorist attack was less important than we are made to believe...
How dare you, Kando! You callous idiot! What if YOUR 8-year old son had died? Etc. My Dutch friends might ask, ‘Jees, Kando do you always have to be ‘in the contramine’? (do you always have to be the devil’s advocate?) You are right. I am a terribly insensitive person for saying this. Nevertheless, I will now plough through with my argument: You see, I am worried that once again we are going to draw the wrong lesson from this heinous act. Heinous it was, indeed. I hope that we catch the culprits and that we punish them harshly. I also support vigorous efforts to maximize security and to fight crime and terrorism.
But the problem is, whenever
something like this happens, we react by urging ourselves to “Do More!”
Well, how about NOT doing more?
How about staying the course? How about NOT panicking? How about NOT going further down the road
toward paranoia and police state
conditions? How about NOT making the lives of 330 million Americans increasingly uncomfortable? How about NOT
barricading ourselves in our homes and our gated and guarded communities? How about NOT changing our culture even more
than it already has?
Bad things happen. They happened in Oklahoma City in
1995, in Atlanta in 1996, in Fort Hood in 2009. They happen in Europe even more
often - in Madrid in 2004, in London in 2005, in Norway in 2011.
Terrible. Continued vigilance is
important. But staying calm is also important. Keep in mind that the danger from terrorism is infinitesimally smaller than that from driving to
work, to school, to Safeway, than that from road biking (which I do every day),
from walking in the rain, from smoking
and from bad eating habits. Just about everything else you do puts you at greater risk than
terrorism does.
We have gotten used to the
hassles of flying. At the airport, you can no longer eat and shop beyond security check, unless you are
traveling that day. Bummer. Walking up to the top of national shrines such as
the Statue of Liberty and the Washington Monument is no longer possible. So be it.
Now, following the Boston Marathon attack, they are talking about “improving security”
at marathons, including other ones such as the Sacramento CIM. And since the Newtown school
shooting, the NRA-types want to post armed guards in all schools and arm school teachers. Nuts!
The media don’t help either.
Take the April 9 Texas knife attack: On that day, ALL major TV channels were
transfixed by that event, hour after hour, endlessly broadcasting meaningless
interviews with bystanders, police
clerks and others only remotely connected to the event. The event was vastly
over-reported, considering that there wasn’t a single fatality. It could have
been used judicially to argue for gun control, as it demonstrated that GUNS indeed
kill people, much more so than knives and other less lethal means. But
that was not the lesson which people drew from that event.
I have run the Boston Marathon
several times, and I would not hesitate to do it again. Former CIA and FBI
official Philip Mudd said: “We understand that this is a risk in today’s world.
But we’re not at the point where we are as
resilient as the Europeans or the Israelis.” To which Rep. Adam Schiff, a
member of the House Intelligence Committee added: “There’s not going to be any
way to protect the country completely against individual attacks. (We should)
not let this change our way of life.” (Sacramento
Bee, April 16, 2013). Amen to that. leave comment here
9 comments:
I appreciate your views. Life is full of risks of natural and human origin. The media tends to be transfixed by the horrific ones. I guess that's human. The only difference is in a global media world it is possible to only focus on the wierd, horrific, or innane and lose perspective on the other everyday events.
Tom - I understand your point but I think there is something important here. The low devils that do these kinds of things are trying to undermine trust in society. The bureaucratic responses that government constructs and the idiotic 24/7 responses that news people do - help advance the notions that the terrorists hold dear - in essence both reinforce the goals of the terrorists.
In the 1970s we took some determined efforts to increase the costs for these kinds of acts - realizing that we could never be 100% successful in containing evil. But these guys are fundamentally evil and we need to confront them.
One other comment - I think where the terrorists fail(ed) is in the immediate responses by many people in the area to help one another. We need to understand that we cannot eliminate evil - we can raise the price for doing it - and we can express thanks for people, often at their own risk - who try to maintain the mantle of civilization when confronted with the perverted notion of society.
I totally agree with you, Kees Wieringa (visiting New York)
Hey, Tom... Seems to me that if we stopped being so politically correct, and went back to calling 16 year old murderers, "murderers" instead of "youthful offenders", and call the action of terrorists "murder", which correctly describes their behavior, we might remove some of the glory or prestige they apparently feel with their own supporters. By softening our language we mitigate much of the public revulsion that historically would have accompanied the behavior. And so far at least, Obama hasn't labelled this "workplace violence", which raises the issue of why the liberals who have been so concerned, and rightfully so, with Newtown and now Boston, had not a peep of an objection to Obama's calling the Fort Hood Massacre work place violence.
Thanks for your comments, folks. Seems that I am not so out of bounds, about terrorism.
George is right that words have consequences, but why change topics and use this event to pile on Obama?
I have the article, several confusing passages several times, and I just don't know what is your main point?
It is confusing from the title on: Terrorism is very important because it is imposed upon us all in many ways, from attacks like the one in Boston was, no matter who did it or enabled it, to the Senate's recent vote by a major bipartisan majority to give Monsanto the public endorsement and more money to terrorize us through our gene pools and food and plant life.
But your title equates what happened in Boston with terrorism. How do you know that? Are you the FBI or CIA agent in charge of the investigation?
Your handling of 'the media' leaves one wondering what, besides tv, you suppose is media, if not the writing you are doing.
Of course popular media is routinely transfixded with sensationalism. Nothing new here.
That is why we turn to outlets like RSN. And we want to see more voices in the mix. But each of us needs to clarify our voices, or we run our readers away.
Thanks for your comment.
My point is neither complicated nor exceptionally original. I have seen several editorials (for example Thomas Friedman in the New York Times on April 18) to the same effect: That we should not overreact to acts of terrorism and change our entire way of life, as this is exactly what terrorists aim for.
I suppose we can debate what constitutes terrorism. I used to spend a week or two on that issue every semester in my Violence and Terrorism class at Cal. State. I recommend Walter Laqueur’s work on this.
nice trains of thought going on your Boston blog. a privilege to be in same World with you man
Total agreement.
Also, there are countries in this world that have one or more Marathon equivalents every day...
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