Slate.com is running an interesting series by Robert Wright, author of Non-Zero and The Moral Animal, on the response to terrorism. He makes a number of points that need to be remembered:
Proposition No. 2: For the foreseeable future, smaller and smaller groups of intensely motivated people will have the ability to kill larger and larger numbers of people. They won’t have to claim that they speak on behalf of a whole religion. They’ll just have to be reasonably intelligent, modestly well-funded, and really pissed off….
Propositions 2 and 3 together give us our first italicized policy principle: Prescription No. 1: Take your bitter medicine early. Often in the course of human events—or in the course of just living your life—you can either bite the bullet now or bite it later. In the stock market, for example, America enjoyed a wild ride in the 1990s and is now paying the price; alternatively, it could have shown more discipline and circumspection then and enjoyed more stable prosperity now. Who’s to say which is better? Not me. But in the case of terrorism, I have a decided preference because in 10 or 20 years, terrorism will have much more lethal potential than it has now.
Technology and computers make terrorism easier and give us the tools to respond at the same time. The war, if you wish to call it that, on terrorism will be a fine balancing act between technology, politics, and economics; something that more of us need to realize and then tell our political leaders.
