Terrorism, and What it Means for Your Weekend

A couple days ago, Homeland Security had something to cheer about. Instead of just waving their "Look out, terrorist pirates behind you" flag and foaming at the mouth, they arrested three men plotting to blow up JFK Int'l Airport. And I say good for them. It's their job to get the extremists, the ones that would inflict violence on innocents. My beef with them is when they get in the way of natural rights, like bring toenail clippers on a plane or monitoring my Internets (which, I can assure you, is 50% porn like any average male). They do their work, we hear about it, and life goes on, yes?

Well, some people decided that the lack of hand-shaking and leg-humping was strange. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg had been awfully mum about the whole thing. I mean, it just happened two days before, why hadn't he said something or handed out medals or given coupons to Red Lobster? Bloomberg was previously known for donating a metric f**k-ton of money to Johns Hopkins University and then riding around campus on his Segeway. (I did not actually see him or his Segway, to this date I have not seen a Segway, do not bring it up it is a sore point!). So how does a philanthropist like Mike answer the burning question of why he hasn't said anything about the latest blow to terrorism in the name of democracy?

"Get a Life."
And I couldn't agree any more.

The average American life expectancy is about 75 years. A third of that on average is spent sleeping, leaving you with about 50 years or conscious thought. How many of those 438 thousand hours would you like to spend worrying about something that you can minimally affect rather than doing something to make you feel better about life? You can think about ephemeral forces that lie just outside your sphere of influence, eventually developing neuroses or psychoses or however many other -oses, until you're convinced you're on some spinoff of the OC except that Seth and Marissa have been replaced with Allah and a WMD.

But those aren't the only things out there. Your body, right now, is waging war against bacteria and viruses and bits of meatloaf you had last week that just won't digest. The battlefield is different, but the outcome is the same: sickness or death at the hands of Un-American Dirt. Will you hermetically seal yourself away for your own protection, plastic wrap everything while in your own personal enclosed sanitary enviro-suit and take up anti-bacterial arms against the terrorist (literally) cells that threaten you?!

I'm not invoking "...then the terrorists have won." Vigilance is not something to be stamped out. What I'm talking about is living in fear all the time, and letting that affect everything you do. Moving away from a city you love and have lived in for thirty years because such a major population is a terror target. Leaving a public bus because a guy with a turban just hopped on. Calling for a teacher to be fired just because she told your children to think about what the news said rather than take it at face value.

Fear is a natural response to danger. But if you calculated all the risks in your life, from driving to living in a city to using a ladder in your home, the safest thing for you to do would be to not live. That's the only way to be free from danger. So what do you do? Do you live in fear? Or do you grow a set of balls (or ovaries) and get on with your life?

You've got one life as yourself on this Earth. Afterlife takes place in another realm, if you believe in it, and reincarnation is by definition another life. And you can quietly whittle away your hours, thinking about how you could die in the next five seconds, or you could pound out that presentation that'll nail you that raise. You can decide to stay inside where it's "safer," or you can walk across the quad and actually ask that cute girl with the glasses out for coffee.

You can live fearing terrorists. Or you can actually live.