It’s only terrorism if it terrifies you
In this AP article about the attempted Times Square car-bombing, I was struck by this quote from Crysta Salinas, a 28-year-old woman from Houston who was visiting the area when police moved in to investigate the suspicious Nissan Pathfinder:
“No more New York.”
There’s not much context in the article, so it’s possible she was only bemoaning the inconvenience she experienced (she “was stuck waiting in a deli until 2 a.m. because part of a Marriott hotel was evacuated because of the bomb”). As we’ve learned from, say, polls finding that huge swaths of Republicans aren’t sure whether Obama was born in the U.S. or not, sometimes people make dramatic, exaggerated statements when they feel out of control in a situation and want to express their displeasure. Maybe she was being interviewed at 2 a.m. in said deli. I know I’d be displeased, in her shoes.
But if she was really saying that she is never willing to visit NYC again, just because some mental midgets tried to detonate an amateurishly constructed car bomb—well, I’m just shocked. I thought Americans were made of sterner stuff. I know Texans like to think they are. Does Ms. Salinas realize that hers is exactly the reaction sought by whoever did this? And that she’s giving it to them in response to what amounts to a head fake?
Fortunately, not everyone is looking for a bed to hide under.
“This is America. This is what we do,” said Earl Morriss of Seattle, who was sightseeing. “Nobody is going to stop us from living our lives and doing what we want to do.”
That’s a little more like it.
It’s not about ” looking for a bed to hide under”, it’s about avoiding putting yourself in certain high risk situations. Times Square is just a target for terroristic activities, and visiting means that you assume a certain risk associated with being there. Being pregnant, and actually being in the area at the time that this bomb could have blown up, made me realize that it’s not a risk that I am willing to take. There’s probably more concerns in the world to cover than whether or not a person makes a personal choice not to put themselves in that kind of a situation.
Probably!
On the other hand, people have been visiting New York City for approximately 300 years. So far, out of the approximately 100,000 available days, there have been terrorist attacks on the city about—what? Two or three times? Let’s make it a nice round five, which gives you about .005 percent chance of being there on a day it happens, not to mention how astronomically unlikely you are to be among the people hurt or killed. (I’ll concede that my math probably does not represent the best way of analyzing this, but I defy anyone to come up with an analysis that really suggests that avoiding New York City because of terrorism makes much sense.)
Meanwhile, 37,000 people die in car accidents every year across all fifty states. If you really want to do something to keep you and your baby safe, it would make more sense to actually move to New York City, where you wouldn’t ever need to drive.
But thanks for reading and commenting!