The politics of fear and persuasion in America today, and why Americans consistently fear the wrong things.

In fact, the politics of fear have been so ably used by the current administration that one might come to the conclusion that their employment was a deliberate tactic aimed at stampeding the American people along a course they seem to have chosen well before the attack itself—a course primarily aimed at securing vital oil and gas resources under the guise of a “War on Terror.”  Looking back at events since 9-11, one cannot help but see how fear has been used time and time again to further this agenda.

The dust had not even settled from the fallen towers when the word ANTHRAX was broadcast on a daily basis for nearly a month. The scare was aimed directly at democratic leaders in congress to sweep away any resistance to the new “Patriot Act,” a tactic that was repeated again the week the law was to be renewed with a clever VX nerve gas scare on the hill. Yup, America was under attack, and the fear this attack engendered was used to fan the flames of two wars, and a host of domestic changes: new security measures, more cameras, laws aimed at “rooting out terrorism” that also had a chilling effect on things like civil rights. As the 2004 election season got underway, the new Homeland Security Secretary went on TV to tell Americans (guess what)—we have something to fear!  Our enemies are planning to strike us again, possibly to strike at our democratic process.  Oh, there is nothing specific he can tell us now, only that “credible intelligence” has led us to believe that we are about to be attacked—and this in an environment where the words “credible” and “intelligence” somehow don’t seem to belong in the same sentence after all we have seen about the Iraq war.

Fear…that powerful motivator that drives so many behaviors. Do you know people who seem to do everything, make every decision, because of some root fear?  Since 9-11 some $100 billion dollars has been pumped into security measures aimed at averting “another tragedy,” and another $300+ billion into the war to “Make America Safer” in Iraq. But was 9-11 really the terrible thing we have made it out to be? Of course, for any who died, and for their surviving families, it was. For the nation, it certainly served as the source of much turmoil. Every plane in America’s skies was grounded, the stock markets were closed, even baseball  stopped. In the meantime, letters with ANTHRAX were quietly dropped into the mail to keep the adrenaline pumping. Yet the actual death toll was miniscule compared to other major problems facing Americans each year. Statistics will show that you have a greater chance of being struck by a meteor than you do of being killed next year in a terrorist attack. In fact the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of the meteor!

The rest of this article will look more at the real culprit fingered so ably by President Roosevelt—not some shadowy group of terrorists, not some threatening oppressive dictator, not an Iranian bomb, but just at the very notion of fear itself. For the creation of fear is, in fact, the intention and purpose of terrorism. The main effect of a terrorist attack is to build fear in the minds of those who witness the event. In this, the Bush Administration has also found that  fear can cover for a multitude of sins. But is terrorism really so frightening? As we will see, compared to many commonplace events that we face without qualms at all, the actual threat posed by terrorism is really insignificant. In fact, your chance of being killed by a falling vending machine, (yes, a vending machine)  is more than double that of being killed by a terrorist! Still, Americans, seem to get all worked up over things that really aren’t that threatening at all.

In his article for Skeptic magazine , David G Myers makes a telling point: “Why do we intuitively fear the wrong things?” he asks. “Why do we fear violent crime more than clogged arteries? Why do we fear terrorism more than accidents—which kill nearly as many people every week in just the United States as did terrorism with its 2,527 worldwide deaths in the 1990s.”  (That’s the 10 year total). “Even with the horrific scale of 9-11, more Americans died of food poisoning in 2001 than of terrorism.”

The CDC now estimates that, in the United States alone, food borne diseases have been estimated to cause up to 81 million illnesses resulting in 350,000 hospitalizations  and up to 9,000 deaths each year—let alone the numbers for world wide afflictions due to organisms like Salmonella, (the world’s #1 killer)  Listeria, and Toxoplasma. Consider those numbers…81 million cases means the threat from food poisoning is millions of times greater than that of infection by a terrorist borne anthrax spore. 9000 deaths each year are more than three 9-11 style terrorist attacks, or 2,000 times more than the five people who died in the so called terrorist “anthrax attack.” Yet, in spite of these numbers, the government has thrown $100 billion at homeland security, but how much money has been spent on the far graver problem of food poisoning? Is there a national color coded system we can consult each day to tell us how safe the food we eat is this week? Does the FDA make regular briefings, replete with dire warnings, saying that they have credible intelligence or evidence suggesting that an outbreak of food poisoning is imminent? Are we threatening  foreign nations that ship us tainted meat and produce with “preemptive invasion” by the most powerful military in the world? Not at all…most people will simply chomp down a hamburger at a restaurant without a second thought, and more people will die this year by eating tainted food shipped in from overseas than from all the terrorist attacks in modern history combined!

Leaving food poisoning, there are over 20,000 annual deaths from the flu bug, and a whopping 30,000 deaths by gunfire in the US each year. The death of 3,000 people on 9-11 was justification enough, it seems, to rush through the Patriot Act, shake up our intelligence systems, fund a new security branch of government, and launch two wars…but a problem that is statistically a hundred times more fatal, guns in America, raises nary an eyebrow. In fact, the Republican dominated congress recently revoked the ban on assault weapons, and put the guns back on the street! When the Assault Weapons Ban was set to expire on Sept 13, 2004, President Bush, that bastion of security for the American people, took no action to support its renewal. Will the free purchase of AK-47s, Uzis, M-16s and Bushmaster assault rifles make us safer?

And this is to say nothing of automobile safety. Highway fatalities account for more than 94% of all transportation deaths, yet 9-11 has made many people afraid to fly—so much so that the Airlines went begging for a hefty multi-billion dollar bailout after the event, even though there were only 120 airline passenger deaths that year out of 433 million passengers! At the same time, there are an estimated 6,289,000 car accidents in the US annually. There were about 3.4 million injuries in 2001, the year that “terror struck America,” and the total number of people killed in highway crashes was 42,116, or more than fourteen 9-11 style attacks that year.  An average of 114 people die each day in car crashes on America’s highways.

No one has died from a terrorist attack here in the US since October of 2001….not one single person. In fact, all the nefarious Al Qaeda has had for us since then has been Richard Reid’s bungling attempt to light his tennis shoes on fire over the Atlantic Ocean—and now we must all shed our shoes before boarding an aircraft, wiggling our toes and hoping we remembered to wear a fresh pair of socks. The cost to America in attempting to “forestall our enemies” has been staggering…billions of dollars spent to “secure our freedom and way of life”…to allow us to go on stuffing our faces with hamburgers while we wiz about on our fatally dangerous highways in gas guzzling SUVs, which kill more people each year than all terrorist attacks combined.

What gives here? But oh…there’s even more scary stuff out there that we completely ignore. Scientists now estimate that there is a 1 in 300 chance of a meteor of at least 50 meters in diameter striking the earth each year. Should that happen, it would produce a 15 megaton explosion capable of vaporizing a city the size of New York. That would kill about 8 million people if it occurred. Two such impacts, just slightly smaller,  have hit our oceans in the last five years. Is anybody scared? Where’s the daily color coded threat level announcement? Is it elevated today or merely guarded? Why aren’t TONS of dollars being poured into NASA’s effort to locate all potential earth crossing meteors, asteroids and comets? The sad truth is that Hollywood spends more money making movies about such a disaster than the government spends to forestall one!

OK. Let’s take a sobering look at things you really should be concerned about, and see where the threat posed by terrorists actually stacks up—in a statistical sense. Want to get scared? Here are the statistics from the CDC and FBI that show us how annual deaths  tend to occur in the US:

1) Heart Disease: 700,142
2) Cancer: 553,768
3) Stroke: 163,538
4) Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 123,013
5) Accidents (unintentional injuries): 101,537
6) Diabetes: 71,372
7) Influenza/Pneumonia: 62,034
8) Alzheimer's disease: 53,852
9) Car accidents: 42, 116
10) Nephritis, (Kidney ailment) nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 39,480
11) Septicemia (Blood poisoning): 32,238
12) Murder: 15,980

Ok, how about some other scary things that don’t end up killing you: (Annual numbers)

Scary life event           # of 9-11 death tolls
Burglary: 2.1 million          700    9-11 attacks
Auto theft: 1.2 million        400 
Assault: 907,219              302
Robbery: 422,921            140 
Rape: 90,241                     30 

Want to make America safer? Let’s throw a couple hundred billion at crime in this country. Let’s keep the public constantly informed about the status of crime in their neighborhoods—possibly with a nifty color coded system? Let’s take some of that hefty war budget and hire police for our crime ridden cities. Let’s make the ban on Assault weapons in the US permanent. Or better yet, let’s be compassionate with one another and simply stop with the burglary, auto theft, assault, robbery and rape! Unfortunately, the present administration seems to feel that the only way to keep America safe is to invade far away nations, at a treasury busting clip, and set up would be “democracies” in countries that have the oil and gas we need for our cars. In the meantime they tell us: be afraid... they are out there... they are coming.

And guess what: It works! Americans do seem to be riddled with anxiety and fear spawned by terrorism. They readily turn to drugs, of one sort or another, to soothe their jitters. Others will simply buy the automatic weapon. But statistics will show that the cure is far worse than the cause, because death rates due to drug and gun use dwarf those resulting from terrorism. The FDA estimates that there are:

400,206 annual Tobacco related deaths
116,000 annual Alcohol related deaths
106,000 annual Pharmaceutical Drug deaths
19,102 annual Illegal drug deaths

Have I made my point yet? Not convinced? Well, here are some other scary thoughts:

888,000 credit cards now in circulation will have false or faulty cardholder information on their magnetic stripes. 9% of all Americans report being in the presence of a ghost. 70% of the dust in your home consists of shed human skin and hair. 50% of bank robberies take place on a Friday. Scared?

But I mustn’t forget to report one other vital statistic: the number of annual deaths in America due to use of “Weapons of Mass Destruction” is currently: 0, zero, none, nada. It peaked in the year 2001 when there were a total of five Anthrax deaths. Correct me if I am wrong, but didn’t the Bush Administration tell us they needed to invade Iraq because of the grave and imminent threat of WMDs to America? Isn’t he spinning this same tired line out again over Iran? Imagine our surprise, after going to all the trouble of shipping half of our armed forces over there and fighting a war, when there were NO Weapons of Mass destruction found. Zippo, none, nada.

Before the war, “credible intelligence” told us:

1) Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction
2) Saddam tried to buy uranium in Niger
3) The aluminum tubes were proof of a nuclear program
4) Iraq could be as little as six months from making nuclear weapons
5) Iraq had VX, sarin, cyclosarin, mustard gas, anthrax, botulism, and smallpox
6) Iraq possessed ballistic missiles to deliver these weapons
7) Saddam was capable of launching a chemical or biological attack in 45 minutes
8) Saddam was involved with bin Laden and al Qaeda in the plotting of 9/11
9) Saddam was planning to provide WMD to terrorist groups
10) Iraq's WMDs were sent to Syria for hiding

Gee…they must be somewhere. I guess it’s time to start massing US forces on the Syrian border. After all, they’ve really been in bed with the radicals in Iran, and have been aiding and abetting the activities of Hizbullah and  Hammas for years.

Oh, don’t take my word for the statements made above. Here’s what the president and his cohorts said…over and over, with an Omnipedia like drone, before the war, and notice the fear laced through all these statements:

“We believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” – Vice President Cheney on March 16, 2003 on "Meet the Press."

“We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases ... Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.” – President Bush, Oct. 7.

“Iraq posesses ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of miles--far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and other nations. We have also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] for missions targeting the United States.” – President Bush, Oct. 7.

“We have seen intelligence over many months that they have chemical and biological weapons, and that they have dispersed them and that they're weaponized.” – President Bush, Feb. 8, 2003, in a national radio address.

“His regime had large, unaccounted-for stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons- -including VX, sarin, cyclosarin, and mustard gas, anthrax, botulism, and possibly smallpox. Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets.” – Secretary of State Colin Powell, Feb. 5 2003, in remarks to the UN Security Council

“We know where [Iraq's WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat.” – Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003, in statements to the press.

“The Iraqi dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons.”–George Bush, Oct. 7, 2002, in a speech in Cincinnati

“Yes, we found a biological laboratory in Iraq which the UN prohibited.” – President Bush, June 1, 2003.

“Facing clear evidence of peril, we could not wait for the final proof that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” – President Bush, State of the Union Address, Jan 2002

Scary stuff, eh? It’s enough to make your blood run cold. Unfortunately, none of it has been proven to be true. Not one single assertion. It was, in fact, nothing more than assumptions based upon, and aimed at fostering, fear. Amazingly, we heard these same dire pronouncements again and again all through the 2004 election campaign, and we are hearing them again over Iran. (Statistics also show that if you repeat a falsehood often enough, it will come to be accepted as truth.) They will be coupled with briefings on the grave threat of Al Qaeda and the warnings about how they are planning to topple our democracy.

Want some odds on how much of a threat terrorism really is to you? Here are some interesting odds on what is, and is not, a threat to your peaceful way of life:

Odds of …
death by assault in your lifetime: 182/1
death by falling : 250/1
death by meteor striking the earth this year: 300/1
death by firearm: 325/1
death by poison: 1,200/1
death in a car crash: 5,000/1
death by choking on food or something else: 5,000/1
death by drowning: 9000/1
death by accidental hanging: 12/000/1
death by murder: 20,000/1
death by an animal drawn vehicle: 31,000/1
death by dog attack: 700,000/1
death in the bathtub: 1,000,000/1
death by a tornado: 2,000,000/1
death by falling out of bed: 2,000,000/1
Odds of being killed in a terrorist WMD attack: 6,000,000/1

The message? Strap yourself in bed! Chew your food carefully! Keep an eye on fido. Your family dog is 8.5 times more dangerous to you than Osama Bin Ladin. Watch out for those horse drawn carts! They are 193 times more likely to kill you than a terrorist WMD attack. Stay out of the water!  You are 666 times more likely to die by drowning than by terrorist attack. And, by all means, watch your step! You are 24,000 times more likely to die in a simple trip and fall accident than in an airliner crashing into the Sears tower next year.

Quantum Sleepers

And since you are three times more likely to die by falling out of bed than by terrorist attack, why not do the American thing and run out to buy  a new deluxe Quantum Sleeper! http://www.qsleeper.com/  It’s a nifty new bed that creates a protective enclosure while you sleep, complete with bio-filters against toxic gas or bio-warfare attack! It has all the creature comforts any American would delight in: DVD with screen, PC hookup, microwave, refrigerator, cell phone, TV, shortwave... and it is bulletproof, water proof, air tight, and has a battery backup system. GREAT for the next major terror attack so you can remain completely isolated from the suffering of the outside world, while staying safe in your protective shell provided by American ingenuity and technology. In fact, it’s a microcosm of America itself...unaware, misinformed, distracted, asleep in its dream of capitalist, consumer-based comfort while the world suffers and starves. What will they think of next?

Consider for yourself if it would have made America safer to spend it like that.

Not lofty enough for you? How about this: We could have eradicated world hunger. More than 800 million people in the world go hungry each day. In developing countries, 6 million children die each year, mostly from hunger-related causes. In the United States, 13 million children live in households where people have to skip meals or eat less to make ends meet. That means one in ten households in the U.S. are living with hunger or are at risk of hunger. The annual cost of meeting all these nutrition needs is just $13 Billion. And, as I mentioned earlier, the world’s number 1 killer is salmonella—bad food.
Are you still scared of Osama Bin Ladin now?

I don’t know about you, but the only thing going on in America these days that makes me feel unsafe is the policy makers that started this whole “War on Terror” thing and the huge cost they have run up in blood and dollars since taking office. But to think again... perhaps they got the idea from someone else. Did you know that major US Oil and Gas companies have sunk over $440 million into the coffers of politicians since 1998? Did you know that of the money we have spent in Iraq thus far, a full 50% of it has gone to US companies who have reaped huge windfall profits from the war?

I’ll end with one last statistic. It seems that scientists have estimated that there is a 1 in six million chance that an animal like the pig could mutate and evolve into a creature that could fly. (And many think the missing dinosaurs accomplished exactly that, and are now still with us as birds, planning to get their revenge on us by spreading the Bird flu.) Coincidentally, that is the exact same odds you have of dying at the hands of the terrorists that pose such a grave and imminent threat to America, even if they do pull off another 9-11 scale attack…Yup… “when pigs fly.”
 
But if you want to believe the administration, go ahead, be afraid… be very afraid… because, you, like the hapless victims on the popular TV show, have been made a fool of.  You’re on “Scare Tactics.”

Article by: John Schettler

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