Refuse to be terrorized.

[phantom power]

It'd be easy to feel powerless and demand that our elected leaders do something -- anything -- to keep us safe.

It'd be easy, but it'd be wrong. We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right into the perpetrators' hands -- and magnify the power of their victory for whichever goals whatever group behind this, still to be uncovered, has. We don't have to be scared, and we're not powerless. We actually have all the power here, and there's one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized.

It's hard to do, because terrorism is designed precisely to scare people -- far out of proportion to its actual danger. A huge amount of research on fear and the brain teaches us that we exaggerate threats that are rare, spectacular, immediate, random -- in this case involving an innocent child -- senseless, horrific and graphic. Terrorism pushes all of our fear buttons, really hard, and we overreact.

But our brains are fooling us. Even though this will be in the news for weeks, we should recognize this for what it is: a rare event. That's the very definition of news: something that is unusual -- in this case, something that almost never happens.

Remember after 9/11 when people predicted we'd see these sorts of attacks every few months? That never happened, and it wasn't because the TSA confiscated knives and snow globes at airports. Give the FBI credit for rolling up terrorist networks and interdicting terrorist funding, but we also exaggerated the threat. We get our ideas about how easy it is to blow things up from television and the movies. It turns out that terrorism is much harder than most people think. It's hard to find willing terrorists, it's hard to put a plot together, it's hard to get materials, and it's hard to execute a workable plan. As a collective group, terrorists are dumb, and they make dumb mistakes; criminal masterminds are another myth from movies and comic books.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/the-boston-marathon-bombing-keep-calm-and-carry-on/275014/

[Laelth]

1. k&r for good advice. n/t

-Laelth

[Demo_Chris]

2. If American's in general are terrorized by this than my opinion of them is vastly inflated.

I suspect that the overwhelming majority are not terrorized or even marginally concerned. I suspect that they are, at the most, somewhat interested -- and that only until there's a new story to follow. In fact, and I will certainly cause some offense by saying this, but I suspect most don't particularly care about this at all -- they'll say they do because it's the politically correct and polite thing to say -- but in their hearts they shrugged and moved on.

That's life. Bad things happen, tragedy and heartbreak come out of nowhere and wipe people out. It might be a bomb or car crash, it might be cancer or a heart attack or a lost job, it might be anything at all. We are surrounded by it every day. When confronted with it we launch our "tragedy response system" and move on.

We express condolances, we say our "thoughts and prayers" are with the victims. We express outrage or anger and when appropriate we try to outdo each other in our calls for savage vengeance. But mostly we don't really care. Not really. Nor should we -- if we allowed all the misery of the world to actually effect us we would be basket cases. We wash off the blood and move on.

It sounds callous, but it's not. It's human.

[Downwinder]

3. But I am dependent on Social Security and Medicare.