Truemors
is reporting from
Member
NP Rank:
NP Rank:
The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is ...
Share: 
by NotPhil | August 28, 2007 at 11:04 am
634 views | 0 Recommendations | 2 comments
... flour, optical discs, digital music players, tape dispensers, neon signs, photography, and sippy cups.
Less than two weeks after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush said,
These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful.
Just a few days ago,
Two people who sprinkled flour in a parking lot to mark a trail for their offbeat running club inadvertently caused a bioterrorism scare and now face a felony charge.
Mass at the Roman Catholic Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi was disrupted when three CD players duct-taped to the bottom of pews began blaring sexually explicit language. ... Cathedral staff members ... called police, who sent a bomb squad ... which blew up two of the players on a grassy area near the church, then kept the third one for analysis after determining the players were not dangerous.
Passengers were taken off [a] plane and questioned by police while experts investigated ... a suspicious package found in an aircraft washroom on a flight from Chicago. ... Bomb-disposal units ... issued a statement ... saying the suspicious package "has been identified as an electronic device commonly known as an iPod."
url="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/6387857.stm"]The Army carried out a controlled explosion on ... [a] tape dispenser [used by police to mark crime scenes] ... found at the [police] station on the Galgorm Road ... which was declared safe. ... Traffic in the town was severely disrupted for several hours while the operation took place.[/q]Which was not long after,[q
url="http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/nonterrorist_em.html"] The Cartoon Network show "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" ... put up 38 blinking signs (kind of like Lite Brites) around the Boston area. [And] the Boston police decided — with absolutely no supporting evidence — that these were bombs and shut down parts of the city.[/q]As another American president pointed out, [q
url="http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5057/"]The only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes.[/q]Something tells me that the War on Terror will soon be remembered as a national embarrassment, much like the Red Scare or the WWII Relocation Camps.
Can we please get over the idea that terrorists are going to kill all of us? They can't. That's why they do terrifying things instead — to frighten us into doing stupid, destructive things to ourselves. We've become a people who will arrest folks for taking photographs and refusing to hand over sippy cups.
What is NowPublic?
NowPublic lets people work together to cover news events around the world.
Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (2)
at 12:45 on August 28th, 2007
NotPhil.
You are writing about people who were inconvenienced. Is that your new cause? "Fighting for convenience"? Or do you object because it doesn't look good? After all, what is the point of combating terrorism unless we look good doing it.
at 13:30 on August 28th, 2007
The reason it doesn't look good is because it isn't good. It's mass pananoia.
Living in constant fear and using that fear as an excuse for harrassing, or even imprisoning, people for innocuous things is not making anyone safer.
I hate to think that half-a-dozen years after a terrorist attack we would still be too frightened to behave reasonably, respect each others' liberties, and not look at each other with suspicion and fear, because if we really can't do that, then the terrorists have won. You don't fight terrorism by wallowing in terror.