Friday, October 29, 2004, 6:04pm
Friday, October 29, 2004, 6:04pm
The sky is nearly dark as I await our departure aboard the 6:05pm Worcester Express. Some last-minute stump speech on the radio during my walk to the station still echoes in my ears about how this particular candidate is the right man to “put an end to terrorism.” It can be done I suppose, but first it requires putting an end to human nature and its propensity to seek power by maligning and attacking established powers. Yet since human nature will never change, terrorism will always be a part of the human experience because there will always be somebody in this world pissed off enough to act out with a gun or improvised bomb.
The useful value of terrorism to this politician’s career is the fear-mongering value of how we can’t easily gauge the danger. Somehow it’s less anxiety-producing to know with reliable certainty that I have a 1 in 100 chance of dying someday in a car wreck, whereas I have no idea about my risks regarding the terrorists. And because of this I also have little idea for how I could improve my odds – tempting me instead to overreact… as in buying a gun, or moving to Alaska, or wrapping my house in plastic, or some other unhelpful step including voting for a snake-oil salesman promising absolute safety from all evildoers.
Likely a lot of people on the other side of tonight’s radio broadcast simply want the whole damn thing to go away because until the risks are understood the anxiety and fear will rise in each and every one of us until some form of rationality kicks in and finally says “enough.” Yet in the heat an election few surmount the fear-mongering message – and if they do, they’re are labeled “soft” on this or that. For this particular brand of politics, terrorism is the gift that keeps on giving and the stump references won’t be leaving the airwaves until the elections are over or someone with the credibility of an Edward R. Morrow rips away the wizard’s control booth curtain once again.
Speaking of obscure risks, I recently installed a wireless card for this laptop and I’ve been able to connect to about a half dozen unsecured networks as far out as Route 128 where the wireless soup begins thin out. The train is too fast to establish a complete link, but some shady character parked across the street could easily access those unsecured home networks. Do people lie awake at night worrying about someone snooping into their personal data?
And the joke’s on me as well since I’ve just discovered how I can log into other PCs on the train, which means the same could be happening with me until I figure out how to secure my own link right here!
Clearly, people worry about the wrong things, and in almost every case this leads to poorly-directed overreactions which actually increase personal danger by misapplying scarce resources. How many people are shot by the loaded gun they have in their home “for protection” or lose their money to some broker promising financial security? Those are the avoidable risks in life. Perhaps somewhere far down on the list I could worry about Osama and his cronies. But my options are so limited that he’s no longer on my radar screen.
Once I’ve done the best I can with the limited resources at my disposal there is nothing more I can do for the moment. Here I must choose to release my looming fear and accept what comes, not as a fatalist, but as a realist. I am not a god, and even if I were the richest man in the world, there’d still be some loophole in my defense network.
I am mortal; I suffer from time to time; things go wrong and I can’t concretely protect the people I love no matter how much I would like this to be the case. I can make a difference but I can’t make an absolute difference.
Some might say there are higher powers to deal with this gap, yet after what I’ve seen in this real world there are no guardian angels and no one should dare get in my face about that because if there were then Jenny would not have died. Or even if I’m wrong on that point, there’s no arguing how they’re pretty bad at their jobs. Yet as I’ve said, there’s no changing human nature or our basic condition, so I won’t argue any further.
Tomorrow is Jenny’s birthday. She would have been 19, and even though it will make no rational sense or change what happened in 1999, I will still burn a candle for her anyway.
“Ashland next.”
