Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [42]
Now, when I say there is no terrorist threat, I am not saying that there are no terrorists, or that there are no terrorist incidents, or that there won’t be other terrorist incidents in the future. There ARE terrorists, they HAVE committed evil acts, and, tragically, they WILL commit acts of terror in the not-too-distant future. Of that I am sure.
But just because there are a few terrorists does not mean we are all in some exaggerated state of danger. Yet when they speak of terrorists, they speak of them as if they are in the millions, that they’re everywhere, and they are never going away. Cheney has called this a “new normalcy,” a condition that “will become permanent in American life.” They only hope.
They call it a war on “terror.” How exactly do you conduct a war on a noun? Wars are fought against countries, religions, and peoples. They are not fought against nouns or problems, and any time it has been attempted—the “war on drugs,” the “war on poverty”—it fails.
Our leaders would have us believe this is a guerrilla war, fought by thousands of foreign terrorist-soldiers hidden on our soil. But this is not what is taking place, and it is time to do a reality check. Americans are rarely targets of international terrorism, and almost never on U.S. soil.
In the year 2000, your chance as an American of being killed in a terrorist attack in the United States was exactly zero. In 2002, your chance of dying in a terrorist incident was, again, ZERO. And in 2003, as of this writing, the total number of people to die in the United States from acts of terror? Zero. Even in the tragic year of 2001, your chance as an American of dying in an act of terrorism in this country was 1 in 100,000.
In 2001, you had a greater chance of dying from the flu or pneumonia (1 in 4,500), from taking your own life (1 in 9,200), being a homicide victim (1 in 14,000), or riding in a car (1 in 6,500). But no one freaked out over the possibility of being killed every time you drove in your dangerous car to buy a heart-disease-inducing doughnut from a coughing teenager. The suicide rate alone means that YOU were a greater danger to yourself than any terrorist. All these causes of death were far greater than the terrorism, but there were no laws passed, no countries bombed, no emergency expenditures of billions of dollars per month, no National Guard units dispatched, no orange alerts and no non-stop tickers scrolling details across the bottom of CNN to send us in a panic over them. There was no response from the public but indifference and denial, or, at best, an acceptance that these tragedies were just part of life.
But when multiple deaths happen at the same time, with such viciousness, and on live TV, no rationalization with statistics like those above can undo the visceral response of witnessing actual horror as we did on September 11. We have come to believe that we are in harm’s way, that any of us anywhere in this vast country could die at any time. Never mind that the chances of that happening are virtually nil. A mass psychosis has gripped the country; I’m part of it, you’re part of it, and even high-ranking generals who now weep openly are part of it.
That’s right, I’m caught up in it, too. I live part of the year in New York City and every day I’m there I wonder if today is the day when the other shoe will drop. I hear loud bangs outside my window, and I flinch. I see planes flying too low and I watch them with a suspicious eye. I check out everyone sitting near me when I fly and I always carry a weapon with me on the plane. That’s right; I carry a weapon. A legal weapon. I have a baseball in my carry-on bag. It was a gift from Rudy Giuliani when we filmed TV Nation in New York. It’s signed by all the 1994 New York Yankees. I figure I could get off a pretty good 50-mile-an-hour fastball if some motherfucker was trying to break down the cockpit door. (The baseball, when stuffed inside a long sock, works well, too; you give it a good swing and wham—a knockout