A Culture of Fear

If you had asked a college student on the 10Th of September, 2001 what came to his mind when you mentioned the word terrorist to him, his answer would have probably been either IRA, Tamil Tigers or the PLO. One day and over 3000 deaths later, the only words that people would associate with terror for decades were Islam, Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

One can say that the massive number of deaths caused by the incident, over 3000 people, was the reason why people remembered it. If that were the real reason then the world should have also mentioned the 2005 Pakistan Earthquake that by some accounts killed over 100,000 people, over 33 times the number of deaths that took place on the September 11th attacks, but that's not really the case , in fact most people around the world would either never have heard about it or don't care to remember.

Perhaps the reason was that it was American lives that were lost in the incident and somehow American lives are more important to the International community than others, but then why wasn't a war on Tobacco or a full scale military invasion of Phillip Morris's corporate headquarters launched for the over 435,000 American deaths caused by smoking tobacco every year?

Sadly it doesn't matter what angle you look at it from, the conclusion is that September 11th was so nicely packaged, coreographed and promoted for the benefit of the viewers of the media, that it justified almost any step of any magnitude that the U.S government would choose to take whether it be an invasion of Afghanistan for public appeasement or a full scale attack on a feeble Iraq in order to appease AIPAC and the Israeli lobby with the proxy war they wanted.

The real victory was not the United States ability to put down troops on the ground anywhere in the world and flex its military muscles without any moral backlash from the international community. The real victory was the culture of fear that was bred that allowed them to brainwash and control to some extent the international public and most definately the American public, to take liberties with the constitution never before dreamed of and to erode human rights and the rights of its citizens.

Its this Culture of fear: the fear of going to school cause some nut in math class with a gun might shoot you (a singularly American phenomenon), The fear of flying on planes, the fear of the shoes of your fellow passengers and what horrors they might contain, the fear of biological weapons and dirty bombs, the fear of men with long beards and short tempers, the fear of Palestinians, Pakistani's, Saudi's, Syrian's, Jordanian's, Lebanese, Malay's,Indonesian's or anybody that even remotely looks foriegn, the fear of Department of Homeland Security declarations of terror alert levels being lifted to orange from green even though no reason for this is forthcoming, the fear of train stations, bus stations and airports and the fear of people who leave their luggage unattended, the fear of the patriot act and what it might do to you, the fear of losing your job to outsourcing, the fear of african bees invading america, the fear of the razor left in the trick or treat candy, the fear of fear.

The best part about all this is that we dont even need any one thing in particular to be afraid of anymore. Fear and paranoia, after so many years of media conditioning has become a constant state of mind instead of an occasional emotional response to an event. what we must ask ourselves is, is it worth it living in so much fear just because 3000 people died 6 years ago ?
Is it worth it giving up our rights as citizens and our rights as human beings corroded so we can get imprisoned by our own governments hiding behind the patriot act and constitutional loopholes like Rendition? Is it worth it to see our children grow up in this culture of fear and have their innocent minds poisoned by Rupert Murdoch's lie factories? I only speak for myself but the fact that drugs like Aspirin kill more than 7,600 people a year (thats 2 9/11's) helped me decide that living in fear so others can take advantage of my vulnerability is not really an option.