We Let Terrorism Work

We’ve just about reached the end of summer. Kids are headed back to school, families are wrapping up vacations to the beach, but there may yet be time to watch Jaws, to remind you just how close you were to dying in a shark attack at that beach. Except that’s a movie, that’s fiction, that’s not the world we actually live in. Since we entered the 21st Century, 17 Americans have died in shark attacks. To put that in perspective, approximately 200 people died each year in that time due to collisions with deer, yet Bambi isn’t classified as a horror film. And that’s just it, the reason why we worry more about sharks than deer is because it makes a more compelling and scary story, irrespective of the facts. While that might make for good entertainment, the same phenomenon is in its own way contributing to an overarching problem we face in society, particularly where culture meets politics.

Fear works as a tactic, not just for terrorists but for journalists and politicians and advertisers and hell even me. There’s no reason I necessarily had to choose that title, even though it’s ultimately the thesis of this essay, but people are far more reluctant to read something entitled “On the Repercussions of a Society Misled by Emotions.” Fear is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. We evolved the traits of fear to avoid predators and to remember scenarios that would threaten our existence. In the service of keeping people safe, fear can actually be a very advantageous emotion. However, there’s a cost associated with anything, and the cost of fear can be the loss of rationality, growth, or even just a sense of well-being.

But seeing as I did mention terrorists, we need to remember why they’re called that. Terrorism operates on creating the sense that it is a much larger problem than reality would have us believe. Now, each life that is lost before its time is a tragedy, not only to the victim but to their families and their friends and those close to that tragedy. I would never want to diminish the real pain that those families feel, particularly because we as a society do not allow them the basic dignity that we allow families who grieve after a collision with a deer, which is to say silence. The families who survive victims of terrorism are never allowed a respite, never allowed a chance to heal in modern society because everywhere you look you can see images and stories of terrorist attacks. They are in the news, to be sure, but they’re on TV and on the radio and in the movies as well. Like a child who keeps picking at a scab, we never let these things heal over because somewhere in the world there is always some story that refuses to go unheard.

In a world that is as interconnected as ours, it becomes effectively impossible to avoid hearing about tragic stories 24/7 in real time. This is because in a world with more than seven billion people, almost all of whom can share their stories at the speed of light, the moment there is an explosion in Mumbai we hear about it in Memphis, when there is an attack in Paris we see it on screens in Phoenix, the moment there’s an earthquake in New Zealand it’s reported in New York. To be sure, we see the best of our common humanity when these stories come out as people donate to charities, volunteer their time, or even show solidarity on social media, but there is a cost as well. The constant barrage of news about attacks and violence and unending war gives a sense that each of these tragedies are part of some great and terrible monster lurking just out of sight. This is all the more terrifying because it simply isn’t true, because in spite of reality this ogre ceases to go away.

It is true that there are terrorists, it is true that they attack innocent victims, but it is not even remotely true that groups like ISIS are very powerful or winning or are some new threat. Terror tactics are as old as war; Genghis Khan avoided many battles by simply scaring opponents into submission. Modern terrorism has been around since the 19th Century and in my lifetime it has been getting less prevalent, not more. ISIS has been on its heels for months now, they will undoubtedly kill and maim more innocent people, but their time is drawing to an end. There will undoubtedly be other groups that emerge, who look and sound very much like ISIS and they too will meet the same fate of all terrorist groups, they will die out. It is quite difficult to promulgate a movement that instructs its people to kill themselves. But they seem like a huge threat. They seem like a humongous boogeyman because it’s always talked about, like an urban legend. And like an urban legend, the origin of the story is ultimately less important than its repetition and its corruption in the ears of the next person who hears it.

We live at a time when more information is available to more people than at any point in human history, yet we feel that people have gotten less intelligent. We live at a time when wars are less abundant and less deadly than at any time in human history, yet we feel less safe. When people claim that there has been an increase in the deaths of cops, it’s only true in the sense that 2015 set a record low for police fatalities and 2016 isn’t poised to beat that record. The fundamental problem is that so many of us, too many of us have learned how to shut up opposition. With all the information of humanity at our fingertips, too many choose to sift through only to the opinions that agree with their own, plugging ears against the whole truth. Attempts to present facts and evidence are met with faux skepticism that rests on the comfortable delusion that there’s no way I could be wrong and anything you might put up as a contradiction to that point is necessarily biased and inaccurate.

I don’t want to hearken back to the Bush Administration too much by saying that allowing ourselves to become divided and scared in this way lets the terrorists win, but when I hear the rhetoric coming out of the mouth of the GOP’s presidential candidate, I hear someone capitalizing on terror tactics. The assertions about immigration across the Southern Border are at their best when they’re only misleading, but are more often utterly devoid of truth. For some years now net immigration has been going into Mexico, not into the US. President Obama, far from being a president of open borders, has set the record for deportations. Immigrant communities, even those who are undocumented, commit crimes at lower rates than the wider population. But none of that matters, truth doesn’t matter, what matters is that people can be made scared and if they can be made scared enough they’ll buy snake oil cures and false promises.

The knee jerk reactions, on both sides, to pesky facts makes it impossible for quite a few to take it all in and see the world as it is. We are not facing threats on the level of the Great Depression or World Wars, in fact this is probably as good a time to be alive as there has ever been and tomorrow brings ever brighter promise. People listen to that and hear naivety, they assume that the world must be much darker and grittier because that’s what the movies look like. People assume that cynicism is equivalent to intelligence and so ignore the reality of the world we actually inhabit and in so doing allow themselves to see scapegoats and demons at the gate, instead of human beings.

This much is not new, it’s always been a struggle for us to see all our fellow men as human beings. We’ve demonized based on race and ethnicity, on religion and political party, on class and regional differences, on gender and sexuality. I would not point to America in 1960 as emblematic of a more unified time, nor 1860 for that matter. We’ve always had our divisions and we’ve not always been able to live with those divisions peacefully, but when you look at how far we’ve come it can give you hope that we’ll make it as far as we need to go. The Millennial Generation is the most diverse and among the hardest working generations to ever be alive. Yes, despite stereotypes to the contrary, it’s not every generation that accepted the challenge of seeking higher education on this scale, yet was still willing to accept unpaid internships as the prize.

There is quite a lot to be optimistic about, there’s quite a bit to be happy about, and none of this takes away from the reality that there is still so much inequality and injustice that needs to be accounted for. The world is hard but we’ve overcome much worse and the only thing that could possibly allow all that we’ve built to collapse is “fear itself; nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” See, this isn’t a new threat we face, and what was true then remains true today. But when the truth doesn’t matter, when humanity becomes a secondary concern, when we let ourselves be prey to fear and ignorance and greed we let terrorism work.