Panic behavior gives terrorists what they want

PACKET EDITORIAL, Feb. 14

By: Packet Editorial
   For the past few days, we’ve had this uneasy feeling that Osama bin Laden is sitting in a cave somewhere, tuning in al-Jazeera on his little satellite TV and getting an enormous kick out of watching hysterical Americans busily fortifying their homes with plastic sheeting and duct tape.
   Having reduced the twin towers of the World Trade Center to rubble, drawn U.S. forces into a long and increasingly unproductive foray into Afghanistan, given the attorney general of the United States an excuse to erode his country’s civil liberties and lured the Bush administration into taking out its frustrations on an Iraqi dictator for whom al-Qaeda likewise has no love, the terrorist mastermind must be grinning from his good ear to his bad one at the sight of all those flashlight-buying, gas-mask-toting, bottled-water-hoarding infidels preparing for Armageddon.
   As public paroxysm reminiscent of the duck-and-cover ’50s sweeps across America, as business booms at the Ace hardware store in the Princeton Shopping Center (disappointing proof that Princeton isn’t really all that different from mainstream America after all), as every Home Depot from Maine to Hawaii runs out of home generators and gas lanterns, we can’t help but wonder:
   Aren’t we behaving exactly as the terrorists want us to behave? Aren’t we helping them accomplish exactly what they want to accomplish? Haven’t we been gripped by precisely the kind of countrywide paranoia our enemies wish to visit upon us?
   Perhaps we would feel otherwise if our color-coded national alert system offered us even the remotest sense of security. It doesn’t. Announcing that the risk of attack has gone from yellow ("elevated") to orange ("high") hasn’t made anyone feel safer. Instead, it has fueled the biggest run on survival gear since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Thank you, Tom Ridge.
   The "Homeland Security Guidelines" tell us when the risk of attack turns orange, we should take the following steps:
   • Be alert to suspicious activity and report it to proper authorities. Duh!
   • Review disaster plan with all family members. Disaster plan? What disaster plan? Do we make one up?
   • Ensure communication plan is understood/practiced by all family members. Communication plan? What communication plan? Do we make one up?
   • Exercise caution when traveling. Duh!
   • Have shelter in place materials on hand and understand procedure. Aha! This explains the nation’s locust-like descent on hardware stores, and the sudden obsession with plastic sheeting and duct tape. (Since real fallout shelters went out of vogue about 40 years ago, today’s version involves sealing off our homes from outside air. Forgive us for fearing that more Americans will, as a consequence, die from self-inflicted asphyxiation than from a chemical, biological or nuclear attack.)
   • Discuss children’s fears concerning possible terrorist attacks. This poses a particular challenge, given the overwhelming evidence in the past couple of days that we adults are only marginally capable of controlling our own fears.
   • If a need is announced, donate blood at designated blood collection center. Well, one really practical, useful recommendation out of seven isn’t bad.
   Don’t get us wrong. We know that our government is in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation. If it doesn’t warn us of danger, we may be left more vulnerable to it than we should be. If it does warn us of danger, we may overreact — and still be left feeling insecure and paranoid.
   But our government owes it to us — and, perhaps more important, we owe it to ourselves — to keep our national and individual security in perspective, to take all reasonable precautions against acts of terrorism but not to allow the threat of terrorism to alter either our daily lives or our way of life. That plays right into the hands of our enemies. Regrettably, our collective behavior of the past few days portrays us not as soldiers standing up to the war on terror but as victims succumbing to it. And that’s not an encouraging sight to anyone — except Osama bin Laden.