I recently heard that for every 17.5 million flights there is one terrorist incident. It may have been on the CBC or Associated Press or New York Times– I can’t remember. It’s an interesting piece of information. It tells you that a relatively small number of incidents have occurred that might or might not require a dramatic intervention, policy changes, new measures– money.
It’s a big world. At any given moment, people are getting into their cars and driving to work, hopping onto buses, walking. At any given moment, panhandlers reach out their cups for change, children starve to death, people suffer heart attacks, bridges collapse. At any given moment, people fall in love, fall out of love, decide to cheat on their spouses, leave their homes, return to their homes, gamble away their money, commit suicide, order another drink.
Out all of the things happening right now, the world– it seems–is aghast because one man tried to set off a bomb in an airplane in Detroit. The media take up shrieking: our airline security systems have failed. They are imperfect. They must be fixed. Spend money! Delay everyone. Surrender our civil liberties! Only stop another bomber from getting onto another plane.
Of course, if we were perfect and stopped every other potential bomber from getting onto every other possible plane and setting off every possible other bomb, we would still have the car accidents, the suicides, the murders, the accidents, the fires, the wars, the famines, the radiation leaks, the cancers, the psychos who don’t bother with a religion, the drunks who still want to drive, the politicians who vote against health care, the nurses who take too long on their coffee breaks, the Generals who believe more of the same will be different, the generals who believe more of the different will be the same, the adulterers, the preachers, the cult leaders, the activists and the passivists– and life would go on– and the bombers would start on the trains or the boats or the stadiums or the malls or the markets or the churches or the mosques of those who are similar but not quite like us must be prevented from being like us but not quite similar.