The "T" Word
I found this quote buried deep within a Salon article:
“While these events are perplexing, and at least potentially dangerous, a presumed link to terrorist activity is, even if impossible to discount, still premature and wrongheaded. Alas that’s a bit like whispering into a hurricane here in 2005 America, where the T-word has been spliced into the very DNA of our collective societal psyche.”
“Thanks to one day’s events more than three years ago, we’ve come to exist in a full-on reversion mode in which every anomaly that’s at once potentially harmful and not instantly solvable takes automatic cover beneath the dark cloak of “terrorism” — a paranoid pathology that shows no sign of relenting.”
“We’ve concocted an upside-down religion, choosing to invest our faith in the cunning of an invisible adversary while disparaging our own voices of reason and good sense. At heart it’s an old story, fear of the unknown, taken to new and self-destructive heights in a politically charged climate.”
And further down in the article, even more:
“One school of thought proposes that terrorists have no desire to knock off a plane with lasers, only to scare us into thinking they do.”
And..
“Here we have cleaners and caterers able to board and roam through aircraft with no security screening whatsoever, yet people are worried about laser beams? Our priorities are insane.”