The Illusion of Powerlessness, Part 3

Fear Less: Real Truth About Risk, Safety, and Security in a Time of Terrorism
by Gavin de Becker

(Page 3 of 3)

Heroism today is learning about how terrorism works. That's part of your contribution to the nation and to yourself. To do this well, our courage will have to be placed ahead of our denial.

With denial, the details we need for the best predictions float silently by us like life preservers, and though the man overboard may enjoy the comfortable belief that he is still in his stateroom, there is soon a price to pay for his daydream. Americans now know the price, and it is too high.

Though I won't flinch from reality, this book is not a compendium of every risk you might face. You've gotten enough of that, and my work is far too practical to participate in melodrama. I won't try to talk you out of anything you feel or into anything someone might think you should feel. I want only what you want for yourself: enhanced safety and freedom from unwarranted fear.

While I'll look at both sides of some government decisions, I'll honor this truth: Our political leaders have been and will be faced with stunningly difficult choices. All Americans have strong feelings about security, civil liberties, war, and a thousand other ideological issues that divide us, but for my purposes here, there is no controversy. If I feel a popular security precaution is a waste of time, I'll tell you so. If something a government official says strikes me as just silly, I'll tell you so. If, in my view, there are things the airline industry could easily be doing to enhance safety, I'll tell you so. If I see people intentionally frightening you for their own profit, I'll tell you so. I want merely to provide some tools you might not be aware of and to share my experience to help you answer these questions:

Can air travel be safe?
Can the government detect and prevent future terrorist acts?
Why didn't the FBI stop the 9/11 hijackers?
What can the nation do to reduce risk?
How can we best talk to our children about what has happened and what might happen?

What can individuals do to reduce terrorism in America?
What are terrorists likely to do next?
Most simply, is everything going to be all right?

I can answer that last question right now: If you define “all right” as meaning freedom from all violence and risk, the answer is no, everything is not going to be all right, because everything has never been all right.

The energy of violence has always moved through our culture, and all others. Some experience it as a light but unpleasant breeze, easy to tolerate. Others are destroyed by it, as if by a hurricane. But nobody-nobody -is untouched. Violence is a part of America, and more than that, it is a part of our species. It is around us and it is in us. As the most powerful people in history, we have climbed to the top of the world food chain, so to speak, and until recently, we'd come to believe that no predator or enemy posed any danger of consequence. We are now ready to look at that differently.

Start by recalling that violence is a force of nature, a permanent and regular feature of mankind-and it is not new. In this sense, our world is exactly as it always was.

For example, in 1984 members of a cult contaminated salad bars at ten restaurants in Oregon. There were nearly eight hundred casualties. Did you even know about this?

In 1986 a heavily armed couple with a bomb took 150 students and adults hostage at an elementary school in Wyoming. They shot one teacher in the back as he tried to flee. They demanded $300 million to release the students, but the plan fell apart when the bomb accidentally exploded, killing the woman. The man then shot himself to death in front of the children, seventy-four of whom were seriously injured by the blast of the gasoline bomb. Did you even hear about this horrendous incident?

In 1995 police investigators aborted a massive plot to blow up twelve jetliners as they crossed the Pacific, crash a plane into CIA headquarters, and assassinate the pope. Did you even hear about this diabolical plan before September 11? Would you have believed it possible?

On a recent Christmas Eve, powerful bombs went off in ten different cities. At the time, it was an unprecedented terrorist event, astonishing-but it did not astonish you. You didn't know it was going on because it happened in Indonesia.

So, is everything going to be all right? Of course not. Never was. Never is. Never will be.

Are you going to be all right? Yes, you are. I am as certain of that as one can be of anything that involves human beings.

I could say that no building you are in will be hit by a plane, no plane you are on will be hijacked, and no biological or chemical attack will affect you. Though the odds are overwhelmingly high that I am correct, your defense system is hardly willing to take my word for it so easily.

So let's look briefly at just one of the risks that concerns Americans: commercial air travel. I believe with substantial certainty that the hijacking of commercial jets the way it's been done in the past is just that: a thing of the past. It is over. For forty years, hijackers gained the cooperation and compliance of passengers through the promise of safety or the threat of harm. Neither of those promises will work anymore.

Regular citizens now constitute the lowest-tech and most effective element of security on airliners. All the meticulous searches, National Guardsmen, X-ray machines, questions at ticket counters, metal detectors, double checking of IDs, and confiscating of nail clippers don't equal the effectiveness of a few passengers willing to act decisively when someone tries to gain unauthorized access to the cockpit. The murderers of 9/11 likely did not know they had committed the hijackings to end all hijackings. But that's what happened as Americans viewed and reviewed history's most effective training video-produced by the terrorists themselves.

There can be comfort in knowing that you are a capable part of an effective security system as opposed to a halfhearted participant in something that's always been a bit of a sham. You can invest confidence when relying upon yourself-just as you're at ease when you're in the driver's seat but a bit anxious when somebody else is at the wheel.

All governments on earth want you to believe that only they can protect you, but our government is us, and just as we need its help, it needs ours. In short, working together is now the only reasonable way. In chapter 7, I'll explore air security in much more detail, providing some information that may astound you. But for now, I want only to make the point that when accurately informed and not deprived of the opportunity for responsibility, each American can participate in national security with brilliant effectiveness. That happened on United Airlines Flight 93 when the passengers decisively took the plane away from men who would use it for mass murder. By sad circumstance, the Americans on Flight 93 got their accurate information late, but you'll have yours in plenty of time.

We have been through many enormous tragedies, and in the next chapter, I'll offer some perspective by discussing what we've survived and how we did it. In chapter 3, I'll share some of what I've learned about the inner workings of fear and its role in our natural defense system. I'll show how to tell the difference between true fear, a survival signal we want because it sounds an alarm in the presence of danger, and unwarranted fear, a destructive impostor. In chapters 4 and 5, I'll explore the architecture of criminal conspiracy and provide specific ways that you and other Americans can see preincident indicators early enough to make a difference.

Chapter 6 will load your intuition with practical information about biological and chemical terrorism, risk assessment, and threat assessment. Chapter 7 will focus on the key parts of airline security.

The nature of terrorism is that it creates uncertainty by changing its expression. Whatever happens, however, you and other Americans will be better able to handle it by taking all you learn and crafting a world that feels safe for yourself and your family. That goal is complicated by fear's primary delivery system: television news. Often it's hard to find the not-so-alarming information that's obscured by the oh-so-alarming presentation. Chief among the skills we now need to stay focused on what matters is the ability to tell the difference between a newsroom act and an important fact. In chapters 8 and 9, I'll present ways to be better armored against news tactics and to help keep your mind clear so you can feel safer and be safer.

Sometimes a violent act is so frightening that we call the perpetrator a monster, but as you'll see in chapter 10, it is by finding our shared humanness-his similarity to you and me-that we can gain the most useful insight. On this there is much to learn, including how to live with what we learn.

So, here's the map for this journey: We'll start by putting our present situation into the context of things we've experienced in the past. Then I'll discuss how fear works-at its best and at its worst. With that foundation, we'll look at what you can do about terrorism and then study some of the specific hazards we're facing today. I'll share ideas about how to get information without being scared half to death in the process, and finally we'll look at some truths about human beings who act violently. If you stay with me-through both the hard truths and the reassuring ones-I feel certain you'll be better prepared for the times ahead of us.

You and I can be sources of reasoned information, insight, comfort, and courage. The more of us there are, the better. And though we may not be able to stop all terrorism, we can stop a lot of the terror. So let's go further into the relevant topics than one can do in a sound bite, go into them without alarming bulletins and scary graphics, go into them without hype or politics, go into them just deeply enough to come out the other side.

Then you can see if you reach the same conclusions I have: that you can find your life in these times, that you can influence your own safety, that you can help protect your country, that you can manage fear, and that you are going to be all right.

Copyright © 2002 by Gavin de Becker

About the Author

Davin de Becker, America's leading expert on violence, is the #1 bestselling author of he Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence, which has sold over 225,000 hardcover copies, and Protecting the Gift: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe. A three-time presidential appointee who has advised the C.I.A. and the U. S. Supreme Court, de Becker has changed the way the United States government protects its highest officials.