The epitaph of a bee sting.

I cannot believe I am starting a blog for this, but I’ve got nothing else that fits the bill for this subject matter and Cato Unbound has no provision for direct comments or responses.  I am writing in response to a Cato Unbound piece by Clark Kent Ervin entitled I’d Rather Err on the Side of the Believers.  In this piece he is arguing that the United States has not done enough to combat the threat of another terrorist attack on American soil.

His essay is in response to John Mueller’s Lead Essay for this month’s Cato Unbound entitled Some Reflections on What, if Anything, “Are We Safer?” Might Mean, in which John points out that the actual threat to an American life from a terrorist attack on American soil is less than bee stings, lightning, or accident-causing deer.  The conclusion to John’s article is that because the actual threat is so small our reaction to it is disproportionate.

Clark’s counter to at least the “bee sting” portion of John’s argument is summed up as follows:

First of all, tragic as it may be, we instinctively feel less bad about someone’s dying from a bee sting than about someone’s dying from a terror attack. Why? Well, a bee sting is an act of nature, not an act of man. A bee, presumably anyway, does not intend to cause the death of whomever he stings. A bee does not, presumably, have an “agenda” when he stings someone. There is no intention to affect public policy, and no intention to terrorize or otherwise discomfort anyone other than the person stung. These distinctions account for why, though every single day, significantly more people die from car accidents or cancer than terrorism, any deaths any day from another terror attack here at home would surely engender bold face, round-the-clock headline news coverage, while a greater number of deaths on that day by car accidents, bee stings, or cancer would not.

This particular passage I think highlights why terrorists love people like Clark Kent Ervin.  What Clark fails to get to in his essay is not why we feel “instinctively less bad” when someone gets killed from a bee sting compared to a terrorist attack, but why, regardless our instinctual feelings, we should treat them any differently from a perspective of response?

In other words, he says that bees have no agenda, but terrorists do . . . ok, so what?  It is the terrorist’s point to try to generate a reaction from that death greater than other deaths of similar (or smaller) number, so to that extent by over-reacting to deaths caused by terrorist we play directlyinto the hands of terrorists and their objectives.  Does Osama bin Laden really expect the United States to convert to Islam en masse and for us to destroy Israel?  Of course not.  His goal is to raise the global awareness of issues he considers to be important and to cause as much discomfort to his enemies as he can.  He knows he can’t hurt us militarily, but how many billions of dollars has he cost us?  Not just in the attack, but in all of our responses to the attack.  Not just billions, but I’d wager trillions in total cost.  He and his like have affected how we conduct our affairs and the health of our economy.

Because we let him.  We didn’t just let him, we’re the enabler.  Without our participation the destructive attacks he plans mean relatively little in the grand scheme of things.  But our reaction–massive expenditures, curtailing civil liberties, modified behavior–that is the payoff.  We keep him in the headlines.  We keep his issues in the global spotlight.

If we treated him like any other bee sting, with rational policies no greater than deserved for the actual threat, his bite would not be nearly as costly.