Stop Everybody...Now, Panic!

So you know this thing in Boston? This thing where they shut the city down because they thought they had found some terrorist bombs? This thing were it turned out these "terrorist devices" were nothing more than advertisements for the show Aqua Teen Hunger Force? Yeah, that thing. So what did these terrible, horrible, fear inducing devices actually look like? I mean they must have been pretty intimidating to shut down an entire cities transportation network. Well, here is what they were:



Well at least if these lite brites were terrorist devices, they had a sense of humor about it. Nothing like getting blown up while laughing at a little cartoon dude giving you the finger. Here is the deal. I am a fan of the show this advertisement was for, I know who this character is and I find this entire situation entirely too hilarious on one hand, and entirely too overblown on the other. In the cartoon, excuse me, animated adventure this guy is part of a team of "bad guys" from the moon. They come to earth and get involved in ridiculously stupid and petty crimes in some plan to cause havoc. They are always woefully inept, however it appears they were able to shut down Boston.

Now do people in Boston just have beans for brains? Possibly. Before you chastise me for not taking this serious enough and applauding Bostons vigilance, let me let you in on an underreported facts about this. These "devices" had been up for three weeks, not only in Boston but in 11 other US cities, including New York City. How many phone calls to 911 were received? How many reports to the FBI made? How many bomb squads called to detonate a cartoon character? ). Zilch. Nada. Not a single call in three weeks about these devices. Not a single complaint.

I stand a 1 in 88,000 chance of being involved in a terrorist attack. I also stand a 1 in 77 chance of being killed in my car driving to work. We spend a billion zillion dollars on counter-terrorism, we have entire agencies devoted to stopping terrorist attacks, it dominates the news coverage everyday (especially Fox News, they like to really scare you). We spend a fraction, an almost infinitesimal fraction of the spending and resources we provide to anti-terrorism on the National Transportation Safety Board. We worry ourselves all day that we are willing to shut down entire cities based on just the mere possibility that some neon bar sign could be a terrorist device. Yet you never see political pressure put on our elected officials to put more funding into repairing roads, into regulating auto industry safety standards, into better enforcement for those who violate traffic laws. Nobody talks about that, we are all worried about getting blown up by a trash can. Why? Because that's what Fox News tells us we need to worry about.

I am willing to live with the small percentage chance that I could be killed in a terrorist attack. Afterall, I live with these chances everyday. I have a better chance of being hit by lightning than being in a terrorist attack. If having to give up some of the securities in my life in order to maybe prevent the widespread panic that sets in whenever a suspicious object is found, I am willing to do so. I would much rather see the resources, the money, and the coverage be put to such things as funding cancer research or heart disease research (the number 2 and number 1 killers in America). To me that seems a wiser place to put our efforts than wondering if that cartoon character giving me the finger is going to suicide bomb me.