The Warm Thrill of Confusion

I hate politics. I wish they would just go away already. But we live in extremely politicized times, and it's becoming ever harder to stay silent. Which sucks, because most people are idiots, and should really just keep their damn mouths shut. But that's precisely why I think it's counterproductive for smart people to keep quiet and let the idiots dominate the conversation, even though I'd really just prefer not to get involved in this fools' game. I honestly can't decide whether it'd be better to step aside and watch Homo sapiens destroy itself, or make a futile gesture to insinuate myself into their nihilistic pursuits. But as an alien who has been stranded on this planet, with no way of getting home or even contacting my kind, my fate is inextricably linked with the fate of these overly self-important apes. And so what other choice do I have? Even if, in the long run, it changes nothing.

As much as I try very hard to avoid the news (as the new Yardbirds sang, "please don't tell me 'bout the news"), I just can't seem to escape it (thank you, Facebook - which, like some stereotypical Thanksgiving dinner, can't decide whether to be a forum for friends and family to keep up to date on their lives, or a place for everyone to vent their political frustrations and practice armchair activism). And so, Entertainment Weekly (which I browse casually for updates on TV/movies that might interest me - but only because my roommate subscribes to it) reports on the recent Ariana Grande tragedy. It's terrible that there is senseless suffering in the world - I get that - but I'm concerned with how we react to it. And I've been concerned at our approach to terrorism since at least the aftermath of 9/11, which happened over 15 years ago already. Allow me to juxtapose two short passages from the article as an effective demonstration of the point I wish to make:

"One music-industry veteran tells EW that...'the zone of security [eventually] ends. It's outside the venue where it gets tricky. If this happened in New York City, you don't get patted down going into the subway.'"

"One music-industry source tells EW, 'With security, it depends on the show and where you're going. Sometimes you get wanded and sometimes you don't. I would certainly hope that would change. Everybody needs to think about security measures going forward.'"

So, let me get this straight. An attack happens outside of security checkpoints, and our response is to make those security checkpoints even stricter? When it's clear that this specific action would not have prevented or even lessened the severity of this attack? At the very least, I'd think that the fact that these attacks keep happening (the article itself lists three other serious attacks that have occured just in the past few years), might prove that the countermeasures we've elected aren't having much of an effect. Who is responsible for re-evaluating the efficacy of these social control programs? Years ago I linked a paper on so-called "Black Swan Criminology" - the theory that shit happens, and that it's tragic, but reactionary policies (enacted with fanfare while emotions are still running high) are often only effective at assuaging people's fears - unfortunately by restricting their liberties - while not actually accomplishing anything to prevent these crimes from happening in the future. We have separation of church and state (if we at most only pay lip service to it); we should have separation of social policy and emotion, too.

Here's my reactionary diatribe:

The police state and terrorism have a symbiotic relationship. An authoritarian government loves a successful terrorist act, because it gives them an excuse (that no one will question, at the risk of seeming unsympathetic) to enact more Draconian measures to further control its citizens' lives, while not actually making the execution of terrorist acts any more difficult (because that would be counterproductive). Meanwhile, the public goes along with this, mumbling the Orwellian chorus of "not letting the terrorists win" while simultaneously contributing to the terrorists' goal of whittling away at our freedoms, because they're too stupid to know the difference. But it's not their faults, because they've been trained by an education system (that runs suspiciously like a prison) adopted from a totalitarian regime, to memorize and recite back anything their instructors tell them, while suppressing independence and critical thought.

I realize this makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it doesn't mean the government and the terrorists are working together (necessarily) - it just means that they have similar aims. And if your government has similar aims as terrorists and that doesn't horrify you, then you need to go sit in the corner and think long and hard about that for a while.