The Onion Gets It Right -- Again

There is lots of breathless coverage of bin Laden's latest missive. But the Onion was the one that got it right -- back in 2001.

We are entirely too worried about bin Laden in particular and terrorism in general. That is not to say that we should forget about either. I want bin Laden captured or killed as much as anyone. And terrorism is unquestionably something we need to try to contain, control and ultimately eliminate, not just here but world-wide. But cancer, handguns and automobiles all kill a lot more people in than bin Laden or terrorism ever will. Indeed, in the pantheon of threats to American lives, terrorism ranks well below all three of these (and many, many others) and bin Laden himself is lost in the rounding.

There are all sorts of indications that we have lost our sense of perspective about terrorism:

We are willing to knowingly kill innocents based on a hope that "senior members of Al Queda" are intermingled with them. We are willing to countenance our government spying on us in the hope that this will prevent a new terrorist plot from maturing. We are willing to tolerate "black camps", kidnapping and torture. We are willing to hold hundreds, perhaps thousands of people indefinitely in what amount to concentration camps without charge or trial and, indeed, without any meaningful opportunity to challenge the basis for their detention. Our government tells us that it does all of this outside the Country precisely because this allows them to operate outside the jurisdiction of our courts and indeed our laws. Yet we say nothing. Indeed, at some level we seem to applaud their cleverness. And, when the courts ever so delicately do provide a forum for such challenges, we amend the law to deprive the courts of jurisdiction. We have a President who has baldly asserted that laws passed by Congress and signed by previous Presidents do not constrain his power so long as there is a nexus to the war on terrorism. Indeed, he claims that even laws which he himself signed do not provide constraints. We are in the midst of the greatest attack on our civil rights and liberties and our system of government since at least the Civil War. Yet we are for the most part accepting, feeling like the abandonment of everything we value and believe to be "special" about the United States is something, like airport security lines, that we have to accept because of the threat of terrorism.

Ladies and gentlemen, the price is just way, way too high. Terrorism just is not that great a threat. You are far more likely to get struck by lightning that you are to be a victim of a terrorist attack.

9/11 was unquestionably a wake-up call. Despite what in hindsight were clear warnings, we had complacently assumed that terrorism was something that happened somewhere else. We now know how pathetically naive that was, and we needed -- need -- to alter our behavior and security procedures to reflect that fact. But the nature of the response needs to be proportionate to the nature of the threat, and our government has done us a grave disservice first by greatly exaggerating the nature and extent of the threat and then, having convinced us that the threat is both dire a pervasive, persuaded us to stand idly by (indeed even to cheer) while the government betrays every ideal we have in order to respond to that threat.

We are in the midst of a mass hysteria not unlike the hysteria that gave rise to the internment of Japanese Americans and the Army-McCarthy hearings. Actually, the current hysteria is worse, since the threats posed by Japan in the 1940's and by Russia in the 1950's and 60's were far more significant than the threat posed by terrorism today.

Terrorists are unquestionably trying to attack us, and, if they succeed, Americans will die. But Americans are dying all the time from a host of evils too numerous to mention. We can and should battle to prevent all of those deaths. But we should not in the process abandon our ideals or our liberties. Some things are worth dying for.

Go back and read that Onion piece again and ask yourself if it isn't a whole lot closer to the truth than what you hear daily from Bush, O'Reilly and Taranto.

We need to get a grip.