Today, 115 people were killed in the USA, several hundred gravely injured, their bodies torn, their lifes senselessly disrupted.
In the UK, 10 people were killed; in France, 15; in Germany another 15; in each country, dozens were injured for life, with the prospect of months in hospitals, families wrecked by the terrible circumstances and the senseless victims.
Did they make the headlines? Not today, and not yesterday, when the same number of lifes were destroyed.
Of course, the culprit in that case was car accidents, not terrorism. Did we send the army on our highways and city roads to track the killers? Did we arrest all drivers for being potential criminals? Did we take drastic measures to reduce car use? Did we declare a “war on drivers”? Did we spent a few hundred billion, create a new administration, give police extra powers to stem this relentlessly deadly phenomenon?
And did our leaders interrupt the G8 Summit to talk about theses deaths and say that they were a threat to our civilisation?
Why not? Why don’t these deaths terrorise us? They are just as gruesome, as senseless, as random and as deadly as deaths from bombs. They are more likely to strike us, as they happen every single day of the year, and they are not easily preventable as what would be the most efficient way to do that strikes deep at our beloved individual freedoms.
Or maybe we should look at it the other way round. Why do we give terrorists such prominence? Why do we talk about them and their actions so much that it so totally influences our foreign policies, out civil liberties and our mindsets?
Let’s ignore them. Treat them as statistical noise. Stop giving them a political platform.
It’s just a big traffic accident. It’s a terrible tragedy for those involved, and we should make sure that they are propely taken care of, helped, supported to restart their lifes, but it should be given no more political significance.
Let’s stop giving terrorists the importance they do not deserve. Let’s not give them a victory by changing our lifes out of fear.
