Some perspective on terrorism

I don’t know if this is a meme taking hold in the blogosphere, or just a sudden downpour of serendipity, but it seems that about every third link I come across takes me to a discussion of the crying need for perspective in the public discussion of terrorism.

First comes a short article in Reason, reviewing the threat of terrorism in comparison to other threats we face every day:

[H]ow afraid should Americans be of terrorist attacks? Not very, as some quick comparisons with other risks that we regularly run in our daily lives indicate… [I]n 2003 about 45,000 Americans died in motor accidents out of population of 291,000,000. So, according to the National Safety Council this means your one-year odds of dying in a car accident is about one out of 6500. Therefore your lifetime probability (6500 ÷ 78 years life expectancy) of dying in a motor accident are about one in 83.

What about your chances of dying in an airplane crash? A one-year risk of one in 400,000 and one in 5,000 lifetime risk. What about walking across the street? A one-year risk of one in 48,500 and a lifetime risk of one in 625. Drowning? A one-year risk of one in 88,000 and a one in 1100 lifetime risk…

So how do these common risks compare to your risk of dying in a terrorist attack? To try to calculate those odds realistically, Michael Rothschild, a former business professor at the University of Wisconsin, worked out a couple of plausible scenarios. For example, he figured that if terrorists were to destroy entirely one of America’s 40,000 shopping malls per week, your chances of being there at the wrong time would be about one in one million or more. Rothschild also estimated that if terrorists hijacked and crashed one of America’s 18,000 commercial flights per week that your chance of being on the crashed plane would be one in 135,000.

Even if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, that would mean your one-year risk would be one in 100,000 and your lifetime risk would be about one in 1300. (300,000,000 ÷ 3,000 = 100,000 ÷ 78 years = 1282) In other words, your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered.

A little historical perspective can be helpful, as well. Over at Daily Kos, DarkSyde explains the magnitude of the threat we faced a few short decades ago:

This is a UR-100, NATO designation SS-11 “Sego”. The SS-11 was one of the workhorses making up a significant portion of the land based Soviet nuclear deterrent…

Had the SS-11s and their buddies been launched at the US during the cold war, they would have reached their targets in a few minutes and converted some 20 million US citizens into plasma. Many millions more would have died in agony over the next few weeks in ways too horrible to contemplate. A full Soviet attack would have turned every major city and military base into a smoking, glassy, radioactive crater.

In that historical context, reading or hearing a bunch of yelping GOP crybabies incessantly screeching in craven horror that Al Qaeda is the worst, gosh-darn biggest bad-ass threat we’ve ever faced is, frankly, an act that has grown tired and embarrassing…

Here’s a message for both our homegrown Neoconservative, bloggy, gutless wonders and the Jihadi nutcases overseas: I grew up in the cold-war, my parents went through WW2 for crying out loud. We are not paralyzed with fear over Osama. Despite your best efforts, I’m not obsessed with terrorism. Sheesh, I barely even think about it. I face bigger statistical risks, in every way, every day, and on every scale, just driving across a set of railroad tracks and down the interstate smoking a cigarette in the rain, and I don’t worry much about that either.

This is a sentiment with which I find myself in full agreement. Yes, terrorism is a serious threat, and has to be addressed as such. Yes, terrorists want to kill as many victims as possible. That’s how they get their viewpoints out in front of the world. Yes, vigilant police work is an absolute necessity in the fight against terrorism (within current Constitutional protections).

But no, I will not allow the terrorists to terrorize me. That’s what they want, after all. Why would I willingly hand them such a victory? And I won’t allow the terror junkies in the media and among this country’s sad excuse for leadership terrorize me, either. The media does it for ratings; the Republicans and their syncophants do it to expand their political base and justify greater and greater encroachments on the rights and privacy of Americans.

"Fear is the mind-killer", we are told in the classic novel Dune. Fear clouds the mind, obliterates reason, and brings out in humans the mindless animal beneath the veneer of civilization we have cultivated for only a few thousand years. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was quite right when he warned Americans that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself". The fearful little terror junkies of the radical right abandon all reason and morality in their blind haste to find a way, any way, to be safe. America cannot allow such cowards to set her course.