A Little Bit of This and a Little Bit of That

That bridge collapse in Minnesota was a terrible thing and clearly other places might want to look upon it as a wake-up call and take the appropriate action. The key word in that sentence is “appropriate.”

Both the print and television media appear to have gone off the deep end and are engaged in an absolute feeding frenzy over this thing. CNN yesterday had a prolonged segment on the tragedy under the banner of “Bridge Fear.” Here we go again with the whole fear thing. I don’t think the media and the government is going to be happy until we’re all afraid to do anything but sit in a darkened room and tremble.

Look, walking out of your front door in the morning is an act of courage. Doing virtually anything skyrockets the probability that you will be killed or seriously injured. That’s reality. Should you take appropriate safeguards? Absolutely, that’s simple common sense, but don’t let yourself be so influenced by fear that you stop living anyway. Remember, nobody escapes life alive.

In a related topic, predictions of what the next terrorist attack will be, supposedly made by the ex-Israeli intelligence operative that was the subject of the movie Munich, are making the rounds on the Internet.

Basically the prediction is that it will be a series of coordinated bombing attacks, either via suicide bombers, car bombs or just leaving explosives in a suitcase or box, in places where people congregate in large numbers. Possible places mentioned include amusement parks, subways, hotels or even sports stadiums.

Guess that means to be safe I should sell my Giants tickets right? Wrong. The simple fact is that if a terrorist wants to explode a bomb in a random place, there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell, barring some unlikely luck, of stopping him. Again that’s just reality. The most we can do is keep an eye out for suspicious behavior and act appropriately if someone does something to arouse our suspicions. Other than that, it’s just going to be pot luck so live with it. If the fear of terrorism prevents you from living your life, then you’ve already lost.

There will be more terrorist attacks. Trust me that the U.S. and allied intelligence agencies probably look upon conventional bombing threats as very low priority. What they’re focused on is preventing a nuclear act of terrorism, either through an atomic device, or act of sabotage on a nuclear power plant. This is the real threat. As disturbing as it may sound, the death of twenty or thirty people in a random bombing is probably looked upon as no big deal.

Ok, now for something a little lighter. I see that in a recent Pew survey that 87% of Americans believe that celebrity scandals get too much ink and air time from the media.

Yeah, I can’t argue with that one. I thought Fox News had become the Anna-Nicole and Paris network! I guess since they couldn’t find anything good to say about the Bush administration or Iraq, they figured airing nothing but distractions was the next best thing, but man was it pathetic.

More interesting perhaps is that 54% blame the media while only 32% blame the public for paying too much attention. This is an example of the feeling of disenfranchisement people have today. This feeling has the basic outlook that each of us is just a small fish in a big pond so we can’t really control what happens.

Actually, you’d be surprised what you can control. Don’t buy papers that dedicate their front pages to garbage news. Cancel your subscriptions to papers and magazines that seem to want to tell you about nothing other than what Paris did last night. Hit them where it hurts, in the pocketbook. It may take a while but stop settling and accepting and see how fast things change.