​Don’t Keep Us Safe

Lahore. Brussels. Ankara. Grand-Bassam. Chattanooga. Istanbul. Paris. San Bernardino. The Russian jet over Sinai. Tunisia. The Boston Marathon. Westgate. Oslo. London. Beslan. The Marriott Hotel in Jakarta. Moscow. Bali. New York City.

You probably skimmed these names; you certainly didn’t recognize all of them. I don’t blame you—there are so many. And this is a mere handful of the terrorist attacks that have killed thousands and wounded tens of thousands more since the turn of the millennium.

Before the dust had settled in Brussels, an explosion ripped through a park in Pakistan. In the two weeks before, bombings in Turkey. A couple months earlier it was Nigeria, a few more and it was California. Comparisons to cancer are accurate: Terrorism is a malignancy that has metastasized around the globe.

Yet terrorism is a pinprick, especially in the United States. Consider the accurate and oft-cited statistics about how you are more likely to be killed by slipping in the shower or being shot by a police officer.

In the wake of each attack, politicians are internationally united by the pledge that they will keep us safe. Our Presidential candidates, from Bernie Sanders to Ted Cruz, disagree on everything except that they will do more than anyone else to protect us from danger.

What happened to the home of the brave? Have we become a nanny state? With the exception of President Obama—who is criticized for being too aloof in the face of a nation’s fear—our leaders sound like babysitters crooning a lullaby: I will guard you from harm.

Terrorism wins every time we take off our shoes at the airport. Every time we think “shooting!” when a car backfires. Every time we trade liberty for security. Terrorism has crept into our psyche and our national discourse, and each time a candidate tells us they will protect us, terror imbeds itself deeper in our homeland and our hearts.

Are you not more terrified by the thousands of teenagers who every year commit suicide? By the 795 million people with not enough to eat, many of them children, many of them in American cities and towns? Keeping Americans safe should be about healthcare, jobs, guns, and housing. I am more scared of pedestrian crossings than terrorist attacks, and you should be too.

We should eschew days of news coverage in the wake of attacks and the politicians who try to look strong by pledging to protect us. I am not saying that terrorism is not a problem, and reassuring statistics about the scarcity of attacks do not invalidate the fear of being blown away at a cafe around the corner from your home, or while waiting for a train on your way to work. Still, why do we succumb to that fear when the grille of a drunk driver’s car is just as arbitrary and horrible a death, and much more common?

Terrorism is a problem, yes. But it’s more of an issue on the scale of wet stairs and falling vending machines. We should treat it accordingly. The dangers of fear are much greater: the loss of privacy, independence, and liberty.

9/11 destroyed more than lives. It tore apart families and left scars that 15 years later are still healing. For many young adults, 9/11 is a first memory. It kicked off an age of terror in which we are still engulfed. And, of course, it dragged the United States into intransigent Middle Eastern conflicts that go back centuries and will not end with Western intervention.

There were no good solutions to the pain and anger that followed the fall of the towers, but perhaps the England of 1975 should serve as a guide. That year, the Irish Republican Army was relentlessly bombing London. From my mother’s apartment, she often heard the blasts. Instead of bunkering down with each attack, the city lived on. The Underground didn’t close. The shattered businesses mopped up the blood, swept up the glass, put plywood over the windows, and reopened the next day. That was how they chose to honor the dead. And Londoners never stopped going out, never stopped showing up and living the lives of their own choosing.

That is how you defeat terrorism. Not by x-raying belts and confiscating tubes of toothpaste.

Of course, efforts to eliminate terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban must go on, as costly and counter-productive as they can be. We owe it to those not lucky enough to live in a country where furniture is more dangerous than militants. And domestic security is undoubtedly important. But we should not crave comfort and obsess over the attacks that are not stopped, because they will never all be stopped. We should accept this risk as the price we pay for living in the land of the free.

Nathaniel Brooks Horwitz '18, an inactive Crimson editorial writer, is a molecular and cellular biology and philosophy joint-concentrator living in Leverett House.