The security illusion
Safety, security -- these are illusions. Always have been, and, short of each of us living in armored pods hermetically sealed off from our fellow human beings (including, I might add, from our own families, since most of us, statistically speaking, stand a far higher risk of being injured or killed at the hands of a family member than by terrorists), always will be. Neither the people of Paris, nor the rest of the world, are any less safe because of the Paris attacks than we were before. The only thing that has changed is that our precious illusion of safety has momentarily been shattered. The attacks amount to barely a microscopic upward blip in the statistical risk faced by anyone of bring injured or dying in a terrorist attack.
And frankly, the sheer hypocrisy surrounding the hysteria over Syrian refugees is astounding, particularly in a country where, with mind-numbing regularity, scores are killed in one mass shooting after another, and yet most of us are content to go about their lives as if nothing had happened every time. In case anybody has forgotten, neither you, nor your child nor any other loved one, will be any less dead having been killed by a crazed, young, white American male with a gun than having been killed by a terrorist. So, 'safety,' you say? I don't want to hear it!
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