Chicago Tribune

Fear of terrorism as a fact of life

Americans have learned to deal with their worries about crime, but they have yet to adjust to a world where terror is an enduring threat
By Rex W. Huppke
June 25, 2006

Amid the fog of America's war against terrorism, it can be tricky to interpret news like the past week's dismantling of a nascent terror group in Miami, one authorities say was plotting an attack on the Sears Tower.

Should Chicagoans be alarmed by the possibility that such a group--however loosely organized--exists? Or should these arrests raise confidence that the nation's intelligence community is on top of domestic threats?

Color-coded terror levels rise and fall, and bad news from Iraq is interrupted by occasional victories against violent ideologues, so the lens through which we view developments such as the Miami arrests is, at best, smudged. Learning how to digest such news--both good and bad--may well be part of our continuing adjustment to a world in which terrorism is an ever-present threat.

"We have to understand, regrettably, that this is the wave of the future," said Yonah Alexander, director of the Inter-University Center for Terrorism Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. "It's the daily menu, if you will, or the weather report. These kind of reports are likely going to be with us for the rest of our lives."

Alexander draws a parallel between the perceived threat of terrorism and the threat of regular criminal activity that exploded into public consciousness during the 1970s and 1980s, when sweeping drug busts and tales of violent drug turf wars made front-page headlines.

Over time, local, state and federal authorities--with the help of a more vigilant citizenry--took hold of the problem, and we all learned not to blow individual events out of proportion. The result: Crime, as well as the fear of crime, dropped.

"The way we learn how to live with ordinary criminality and to bring it to some manageable level, that's the same way we have to deal with terrorism," Alexander said. "We have to strike some sort of a balance in terms of the nature of the threat."

However, until consensus is reached on what constitutes a real threat--or until Americans grow desensitized to tales of people supposedly hell-bent on destruction--we remain susceptible to the political winds that blow the news our way.

Jeremy Straughn, an assistant professor of sociology at Purdue University, said the Miami arrests will inevitably be embedded into the different narratives woven by Democrats and Republicans jockeying for election-year position.

For supporters of the Bush administration, these arrests may be framed as proof that America must stay the course in the war on terror and, in turn, the war in Iraq. Opponents of the war are likely to present the arrests as evidence of domestic threats that must be addressed, implying the war in Iraq is a misplaced effort. In the end, Straughn said, many will form opinions based on the political narrative they choose to follow.

But until we all truly understand the dangers that have bubbled up since 2001, our visceral reaction to the news of the day--be it fear or relief, cynicism or pride--will likely remain as unpredictable as the world in which we live.