Why is the US at war with terrorism?
When a society produces far more in output than it needs to survive the general standard of living inevitably improves. With an increase in abundance, the relative power of the few who were powerful in the past decreases. All people have the ability to procure food shelter and clothing. Nobody needs to go hungry due to a lack of food. Time for intellectual pursuits is increased, as is the population's literacy. When a person's basic needs are provided for in a mere several hours per day there is an abundance of the one thing that was unavailable in distant times, free time. Free time makes people difficult to rule. When a person is not saddled with mind numbing work he comes to realize that those who govern are more interested in maintaining their control than in improving his life he becomes disobedient. Therefore those in power must develop a way of ensuring that free time is taken away. In ancient times, those in power would waste huge amounts of labor building useless monuments to fabricated entities to ensure the lack of excess capacity. Imagine how much more free time the citizens of ancient Egypt would have had had they not been saddled with the requirement to build massive pyramids. Or in Europe, imagine the time consumed by building massive chapels, many million hours of labor went into construction while those building them lived in tiny huts barely sustaining their own lives. The wasted time in prayer, in labor working for the tithes, the labor lost in war and in actual work building churches could have gone into improving the standard of living for the masses but that would not have advanced the goal of the leadership. The leaders want power and status. Power and status not from admiration but instead from mere excess and inequity. In more recent times, power comes more often through fear, the fear that unless you give up your time, money and liberty bad things will happen to you and your country.
Why are you afraid of 'Al Queda'? No really, think about that question. Why do you know about a group of maybe one thousand nomadic fundamentalists living thirteen thousand miles away? Why is the hatred there, the fear, the desire to get back at them, why do those thoughts exist in your head? It's because the people who want to be powerful need a boogeyman to scare you into following them. Without a boogeyman nobody would agree to take off their shoes before boarding an airplane or to being randomly searched in public for no valid reason. People need to stop fearing terrorists and terrorism, it is a fabricated terror, fabricated not by those who hate us but instead by those who want to control us. Fear not that which you cannot control. If you yourself cannot do anything to prevent it you should not fear it for regardless of your actions or inaction it will or will not happen. Just like the setting sun it is outside of your control. To beat terrorists ignore them. Treat a terror attack like a police matter, find who did it, jail them and rebuild. For since the 'attacks of 9-11' we have wasted many thousands more lives in building up the terror threat and its attendant bureaucracy than the terrorists succeeded in murdering. Consider if you will how many hours of life has been wasted standing in long lines for aircraft taking off your shoes and being humiliated in a pointless attempt to scare you into agreeing to fund the government's efforts. Some simple math here, in 2005 the airlines in the US carried 745 million passengers. If each of those people had to arrive 30 minutes earlier than they would have had these security measure not existed a total of 372 million hours was wasted. Assuming the average person lives 72 years then that is the equivalent of 591 lives wasted in 2004 alone just in security lines. Think about the last time you flew, did you wait just 30 minutes extra due to security? Include the hassle getting dropped off and picked up because of the fear of car bombs and the no liquids stupidity. Was it only 30 extra minutes wasted? The total lost life since 2001 in airport lines, 5 years worth, exceeds the direct deaths caused by the murders of 9-11.
On to a more direct approach. A lot of people dies on 9-11, shall we look at some numbers:
Causes of death in the US, data from 2004 ( they have a better chart )
Heart disease: 654,092
Cancer: 550,270
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 150,147
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 123,884
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 108,694
Motor Vehicle Accidents: 43,947
Diabetes: 72,815
Alzheimer's disease: 65,829
Influenza/Pneumonia: 61,472
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 42,762
Septicemia: 33,464
Intentional self-harm (suicide): 31,647
…
Alcoholic liver disease: 12,283
…
Injury at work: 4,971
Accidental drowning and submersion: 3,180
Complications of medical and surgical care: 2,889
9-11 attacks (2001) : 2,819
Water, air and space transportation accidents: 1,855
Alright, we see that the terrorists are nearly as scary as the flu, no wait, septicemia, no wait, doctors and slightly more scary than being on a boat or spacecraft. So I guess it is completely rational to be afraid of something on this list that you might be able to affect but terrorism is such a tiny risk why are we wasting so much time and money chasing it down? I'll tell you, it is the latest boogeyman to keep the population of this country as close to sheep as possible. Scared sheep are easy to control. Don't be a scared sheep!