BY ALEXANDRA WILLIAMSON
aewillia@go.olemiss.edu
We refuse to be terrorized.
People said it after 9/11; if you trade the government your liberty for the promise of safety, you’re letting the terrorists win. And the same can be said now. After the attack on the World Trade Center, we gave up any semblance of privacy for the Patriot Act and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). What are we going to give up this time around?
I hope we don’t plan to give up anything. I hope that we, as a nation, do not write to our congressmen and instruct them to try to retroactively legislate last week out of existence, but I’m willing to bet that as soon as we’ve got some concrete facts leaking out, people will be begging for closed immigration “loopholes” and a ban on the production of pressure cookers or something. It’s the American way, you know.
Unfortunately, what people don’t want to acknowledge is that there is a lot of risk inherent in simply living. There’s risk when you drive a car to campus and when you walk to class and when you go to sleep at night. And while you can do your best to minimize the risk in your life, you can never account for the actions of others, and can therefore never truly be rid of risk.
What happened in Boston was terrible, and I believe that’s widely the nation’s consensus. But when a single wounded teenager on the run can cause an entire city to be shut down and turned into a near-police state, we must admit that terrorists have succeeded.
Four people were killed during the events in Boston last week, and only three were killed by the initial blast. It’s obviously not a high casualty rate that captures the nation’s attention, as might have been assumed to be the case after 9/11. No, it seems that all it takes to paralyze Americans in fear is any highly-publicized violent disruption of everyday life.
People wishing to bring an end to the American way of life, if such a thing really even exists, need not now even take lives or demolish buildings. They must merely hijack our attention. If they can do that, then they can drive people to fear and have accomplished their goal.
No, the only way to truly fight the terrorists is to, in the words of Albert Camus, “become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
Keep things in perspective.
Remember that you’re still more likely to die from accidental electrocution than a terrorist attack. Do not let fear coax you into giving up that which makes life worth living: freedom — of choice, of thought, of action.
Alexandra Williamson is a senior accountancy major from Frisco, Texas. Follow her on Twitter @alyxwi.
