Terrorism

Sep. 12th, 2011 04:32 pm
citrakayah: (Default)
[personal profile] citrakayah
Terrorism is a very odd thing. It claims relatively few deaths but has a profound cultural impact. Granted, I suppose having a group of people who have stated that they want to destroy your culture and replace it with a much less pleasant one (when someone comes around trying to replace American consumerism with laid-back hippie-esque culture, let me know) does that to you. But I think that the very rarity of terrorist attacks makes it have such attention. If it happened a hundred times a year with individual body counts staying low (one or two people), I suspect that people would get use to it. After all, bee stings and car crashes kill lots of people but don’t receive the attention and money that terrorism does. Of course, 9/11 changes that significantly, because a lot of people died.

It’s still interesting, though, that as humans we so often pay the most attention to what is least likely to kill us. Very irrational as well, but mass reactions rarely are. But I think as a culture, we need to rethink how we rank dangers: we ought to do it by number of people killed rather than what is most visible. There are a whole host of other dangers: global warming changing weather patterns, disease, starvation, really lousy aim by drones, and the murder rate all come to mind.

Of course, it's one thing to say that we should rethink our priorities and another thing to say that we should simply ignore something. I don't think the latter. Terrorism is indeed a threat and does indeed need to be countered. But there is the question of how much time and effort diverted to fighting terrorism is effective, and how much is not or would best be used someplace else.

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Citrakāyaḥ

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