Almost 20 percent of Americans now put terrorism at the top of their index of anxieties, more than the percentage perturbed about the economy, health care, climate change, crime or anything else. Only a month ago in the same poll, the number was just 4 percent. Another nationwide poll says almost 30 percent of Americans believe that they, or a loved one, will be the victim of a terrorist attack.
Which is no surprise. We’re scared. After San Bernardino, it’s not just someone else’s problem any more. It’s the enemy within. And there might be more. That’s the scariest part of all.
The Islamic State has an almost inexplicable appeal for alienated young people. I reported on the disaffected masses over the years from the Middle East, but now we’ve got some here too. The allure is rooted in an aspiration for otherwise unimaginable power and acceptance, retribution and religion. And for some sickos, savagery.
Can we contain it, let alone wipe it out? With its culture, and suicidal zeal, now contaminating almost every continent, that will be somewhere between terribly punishing and near-impossible to accomplish.
If you heed history from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, you’ll see that Ted Cruz’s “carpet-bombing” plan won’t do it, nor will Donald Trump’s ban on Muslims. Nor, by the way, will Islamophobic hostility toward local Muslims, as reported last weekend by The Denver Post.
Meanwhile, President Obama has clairvoyantly claimed that the Islamic State “will not pose an existential threat to us.” No, human existence itself might not be threatened, but as individuals, our very existence can be snuffed out in an instant if we are caught in the next San Bernardino.
The president was careless to convey a false sense of security by implying that our intelligence agencies and domestic defenses can incontrovertibly protect every last one of us. His subsequent Oval Office speech further failed to allay our angst. And don’t expect his appearances this week, meant to strengthen the case for his strategy against Islamic terror, to turn those pessimistic poll numbers around.
Not that he could, because the Islamic State-inspired attacks in California came out of nowhere, and for that alone, they were scary. But here’s some advice: don’t act scared. Acting scared won’t do you any good. Should you act wary? Sure. Observant? Absolutely. Maybe even ready, whatever that means. But scared? Not unless you want an ulcer.
I could back that up philosophically by simply saying, it’s useless to worry about things you can’t control. What are you going to do if you agonize that an attack might occur around every corner you turn? Sit out the next Broncos game? Stay away from your workplace Christmas party? Keep those shabby shoes another year because your mall might be the next target?
Sure, in woeful retrospect, that kind of crowd avoidance would have saved some lives in San Bernardino. But no one had a crystal ball then, and no one has one now. All we can assess to make decisions about our daily lives are the odds of being the next victims of murderous madmen. Based on those odds, crowd avoidance is almost pointless, not to mention unproductive. If you start breaking it down into percentages — the number of people victimized the day of the shootings versus the number in San Bernardino overall, or the number of San Bernardinos attacked that day versus the thousands of communities untouched — the odds are higher that you’ll be struck by lightning. What are you going to do with that — just never go outside?
The fact still is, the chance that you or I or anyone we love become the next victims of Islamic terrorists (or any others) are comfortably, almost infinitesimally low. We win by not running scared.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen was a correspondent for ABC News for 23 years, then for HDNet television’s “World Report.”
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