IWALLK: A Living Magazine - Day 304 - Homecoming - Washington: Freedom from "Security"

This was my second day in Washington. At first, I thought it might be unremarkable, but a few things made it special after all.

The sleep spot was perfect. In the morning the traffic was allowed to use both lanes, just to get into town. That meant they were all driving away from me. And besides, no one would have really cared anyway. I packed up and headed back to Georgetown.

I had a lot of work to do; now having fallen behind several posts, needing to process pictures and produce videos. I spent most of the day at the Starbucks on M. When I'd worn myself out, I decided to head back toward the mall, via the White House.

It turned out that it was an interesting day for Marine One. They were training a new pilot. This process took bystanders and myself alike by surprise. For two solid hours the helicopter flew in and flew out. All of us were disappointed to see no president or other stately personage arriving or departing. But nevertheless, it was fascinating to see it. I took the following pictures and videos of the very formal way this is all achieved, along with how the streets are blocked off when dignitaries arrive at the White House...

I was tired and took some time to relax on the lawn of the Mall. And as you saw in the video above, I suddenly realized just how beat up my legs were. I also had time to think carefully about what I was seeing here in the capital of the United States. Especially interesting to me was the lack of security, and the freedom I felt because this lack. Formalized, this is what what I came up with...

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FREEDOM FROM "SECURITY"

There is something about being in the capital of the nation, and the city that essentially makes policies that influence the entire planet.

I'll tell you right now that what I like the most about Washington is its accessibility. For example, every public museum is free! What other city can claim that?

I like that the White House itself (a small executive mansion, compared with most other countries) is kept relatively vulnerable. Actually, the whole city is vulnerable! And I liked it.

What a metaphor about the nation that values freedom above all other things; and the access of the citizens to those who govern them. I walked around the White House with a huge 50 pound backpack that could have had anything in it. The police took notice (as they do of everyone), but they never confronted me nor made me feel uncomfortable. I could have held enough explosives to blow away the security gates and allow others to enter. But it is not about trust--mine, nor theirs. It is about ideals. Washington is the city of ideals. And, thank goodness! The last time I checked, we still have a Constitution, and the checks and balances of power - while not perfect - are still in place to protect its ideals.

If we were to shelter everything behind razor wire, electric fences, and velvet ropes, we would be separating it from reality. The reality is that it is a dangerous world, but one that the U.S. government (I think) courageously keeps itself open to for the everyday man, woman, and child.

What would be the point of having pretty parks, majestic monuments, and high ideals, if people could not touch the 200 year old marble columns and view the most iconic buildings in world history from only a few feet away? It made a point for me. If we lose our freedom to do these things, then we have lost the freedom to be human beings.

As much as I focus against the problems that affect our American society and thus the expectations of the world, I genuinely applaud our country for keeping its most valued assets able to be seen or touched; for anyone, rich or poor, of any color or religion.

For the aforementioned reasons, I fear the national and international tightening of security over the threat of terrorism. Despite the super-spin and melodramatic tone of the press, when seen in simpler terms, it is a numbers game. Terrorists of any bent simply don't have the numbers to take away freedom as effectively as governments do. It is just a fact. The threat of death by terrorist acts to U.S. citizens is statistically insignificant...

Source: start.umd.edu

The U.S. population is nearing 320 million. That means that terrorism has wiped out about 0.001% of us--and this, over twenty years. In the last two decades, most of the deaths from terrorist acts in this country were in the year 2001--due to the 911 attacks. That was a fluke year (as seen above). Nevertheless, when factored in, it means that an average 160 Americans per year are dying from terrorism. Yet, we are told that it could happen at any moment in any city. We are told that we should be prepared to die from terrorism at any moment. We are told to report any "suspicious" activity to the authorities in order to avoid this "clear and present danger."

But, danger just isn't the case. In a fantastically well-researched and highly sourced article - Anti-Terrorism Spending 50,000 Times More Than on Any Other Cause of Death, by Mike P. Sinn - at thinkbynumbers.org, the factual situation is laid out with precision and bit of humor.

As I wrote about the similarly false claim by the media, politicians, and law enforcement agencies that "drugs" are an "epidemic" in Maine--and the nation (please read the essay, called, "The Maine Problem" from Day 232), I will demonstrate exactly what a non-threat terrorism is, and just how much money is being made by media, politicians, and law enforcement agencies from convincing us all that it is the number one risk in the world--or at least near the top of the list. It isn't. And, I want to show you why. To do this, I will quote and paraphrase the information from Think by Numbers, along with my own commentary.

Heart disease (killing 700,000 Americans each year) and cancer (killing 550,000 Americans each year) are the top two risks to life that the citizens of our country face. Yet they are not prioritized as such by the U.S. Government. Not in the slightest way. Consider this (my emphasis)...

The US spends more than $500 million per victim on anti-terrorism efforts. However, cancer research spending is only $10,000 per victim.

Again, these are facts, not opinions. Are we really allowing our government to spend 50,000 times more money on the "problem" of terrorism than on cancer research? I've lost over a dozen people whom I dearly loved in my life to cancer in just the last five years--four just in the last six months. I have personally never lost a family member or friend, nor known of any acquaintance who was killed or maimed by a terrorist act, that's in 47 years!

It is pathetic - at least to me - that people are so easily led to do things just because they are told to do them. Now, I wouldn't mind paying taxes if I had control over where the money goes. I suspect most of you out there might agree. Some folks think that they should never pay any taxes at all. To each his own. Whether we should pay taxes is not my point.

Military related spending is stupendously high when compared to other government investments. And, recall that this is money allocated for killing people. Here is a snapshot from the running counters at the National Priorities website...

Notice that for only the recent action against ISIS, we are now paying $615,482 per HOUR.

See the numbers tick away, here.

I don't underestimate the horrible results of the insanity of groups like ISIS. Nor do I discount the vicious nature of the foes which the American government chooses to oppose militarily. But the lack of perspective in spending is appalling to me. It is also very disappointing that more of us aren't paying attention to these disproportionate activities, and then demanding change. The question for me, then, is why? I tend to agree with Mr. Sinn, who sums up his hypotheses as follows...

Why is the government response so disproportionate to the threat?

EVOLUTION
Evolutionary psychology may be able to explain this phenomenon. The human brain has been around for 200,000 years. More than 99% of that evolution has been characterized by starvation and general scarcity of resources typified the environment in which humans evolved. In this situation, violent acquisition of resources from other groups was often a necessary survival technique. Hence, human brains most hyper-vigilant and aggressive toward human threats (i.e. terrorists) were most likely to survive and propagate these characteristics.

On the other hand, throughout evolutionary history medical science was almost non-existent. Hence, there would be no survival value added by a tendency to focus on more likely health-related causes of death. We just weren’t designed for these times.

ANXIETY FATIGUE
One possible reason is anxiety fatigue. When an individual is subjected to a stimulus for an extended period of time, such as the aroma of a hospital room, the sound of a fan, or the endless nagging of the mother-in-law, their mind eventually just filters it out. Mortality risks such as heart disease and cancer extend farther back in time than even the existence of our current civilization. Our society now more or less accepts these unfortunate facts of life as another cost of doing business.Thus, they’re filtered out of our collective consciousness to some extent. On the other hand, consider the SARS virus scare a few years ago. Despite the absence of a single American fatality, the newness of this airborne illness allowed it to occupy headlines for weeks. Similarly, the Islamic terrorist menace is also a relatively new phenomenon to the US. Maybe threat fatigue for terrorism just hasn’t set in yet.

ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES
The economic consequences of terrorism would, at first thought, seem like a justification for the level of concern. There was a huge financial cost associated with the 9/11 attacks. Total related insurance claim payments are estimated at $32.5 billion. However, there’s been no definitive proof that the attacks lead to a significant decline in GDP. In fact, a GDP which had been falling due to recession in the quarter prior to 9/11 actually started growing again in the quarter following 9/11.

It’s conventional wisdom that military spending is good for the economy. However, most macroeconomic models show that, in the long term, military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment. This ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment. So if one thinks they’re protecting our economy by taking trillions of dollars away from other productive uses to fight the so-called global war on terror, they should consider upgrading their abycuss to a calculator.

NUCLEAR BOMBS
Another seemingly more justifiable reason for a magnified response to terrorism is the potential for a nuclear attack that could result in a far greater number of casualties than the typical terrorist attacks have to date. According to many experts on nuclear proliferation, the possibly insurmountable technical challenges of building or acquiring a thermo-nuclear weapon are enormous. Including the requirement that the weapon be portable, makes the likelihood of acquisition dramatically more remote. However, there is a real threat that highly enriched uranium could be acquired from a former Soviet state and used to make a crude bomb. This is a serious risk and needs to be addressed by either securing or downgrading the 1000 tons of yellowcake remaining within Russia and her neighbors. The government currently spends about a billion dollars on this effort annually. Compare this to the two billion we spend in Iraq every week and one might assume we have a bonobo setting our national security priorities in exchange for bananas.

HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY
Finally, the psychological makeup of our species could also be a contributing factor to this risk amplification. Just look at the plot structure of a work of fiction. The vast majority of conflicts are between a human protagonist and a human antagonist.We seem to maintain an inherent attraction to interpersonal or, on a larger scale, inter-societal conflict. It’s only natural that this affinity translates to our media diet as well. Many studies have shown that the media sets the public policy agenda.So, the point is that interpersonal and societal conflicts like that between Western civilization and Muslim extremists are simply better able to maintain our attention than conflicts between man and complex, abstract medical threats.

In addition, sociologists and psychologists have determined that society amplifies the danger of risks imposed upon them, such as terrorism. Conversely, society finds risks resulting from voluntary behavior, such as car accidents, more acceptable.

While, in my opinion, these are quite reasonable proposals, it seems that Americans who claim to be so angry about the economy, income inequality, the inability to pay off student loans, healthcare costs, and all of the other "concerns" that we "learn" about from mass media (in between their constant advertisements to buy the things we don't really need, that their corporate boards of directors also own stock in), should be outraged with what their money really goes toward.

Republicans often propose cutting social programs, claiming that they are mismanaged and corrupt, while ignoring that the reasons for this corruption and mismanagement is probably due to underfunding in the first place. Politicians have their own form of spin and overblow. The so-called "problems" in the programs that allow the poorest people to receive help, are inflated and mischaracterized, using the media's own trick of the unyieldingly repetitive restatement of memes.

On the other side of the aisle, Democrats seek to put too much reliance upon funding the government (along with its emphasis on military agendas) in general, giving it far too much leverage to impose regulations and micromanage people's lives. Yes, social programs are more conscientiously addressed, but in order to get legislation passed that will provide adequate funding, pork is added. This cheapens the values of governing, pisses off non-constituents, increases the role of lobbyists and all of the corruption that goes along with these.

Then, because the corporations who own the mass media, the politicians - both Republican and Democrat - who skilfully utilize that media, AND the companies who manufacture and supply all the stuff that keeps these organizations in business, hold all the strings, the public is kept well out of the loop. It is forced to live and even think entirely along the lines from the "messages" it has been brainwashed into believing--apparently, without question.

Getting back to our focus on national security in Washington DC, which is (as I was observing so plainly on this day) so subtle as to potentially be a terrorist's dream come true. I had to conclude that the openness and freedom of movement demonstrated here for the citizenry to explore these hallowed halls and power-based institutions was an ideal about which I have found well worth all of the effort above to explain.

Were we then to carry this ideal over to our fiscal over-concern about the risk of terrorism, we might be able to prevent heart disease, cure cancer, provide grants for students to go to college, have universal healthcare, and be a more prosperous and happy society.

Furthermore, although it might be argued that the reason more people aren't killed so frequently and in higher number by terrorism, is due to the huge amount of money budgeted to fight it, the results of our efforts don't have a proportionate effect, compared to how much we pay for them. Governments like the United States play by internationally determined rules, even in war. And, we have rarely not been at war in some capacity.

Terrorist groups depend on having no rules, or blatantly breaking the rules established and recognized by other nations. For terrorists like ISIS, it is simply a matter of trying out new atrocities. No formal set of governmental checks and balances can possibly keep up with the rate of defense needed against an offense force that honors no such procedures.

Will terrorists try to use commercial jetliners to destroy significant targets in the U.S. again? Probably not. Yet, the entire effort to tighten security at airports in response to this one-time tactic (after 911), has become so overdone that it is ruled by ridiculous intrusions upon privacy and dignity--freedom.

My hometown friend, Cynthia, told me at lunch that she watched airport security pull a very elderly couple out of line, made them take off their shoes, scanned them and then angrily told the husband - who had bent down to help his wife put her shoes back on - to "Step back, sir!!" Cynthia stepped in and tried to reason with the security person, pointing to the fact that the elderly woman was unable to put her shoes back on without the assistance of her husband.

This kind of liberty to strong are citizens is just letter-of-the-law gone way too far. Authority given to people who then believe they are above the law, who thence abuse that authority as airport security officers (for example), is the direct result of the fear that has been driven down our throats since that terrible day of 911. And, it isn't even stopping terrorism.

The terrorists simply checked the airplane crashing option of their evil think tanking list and moved on to other strategies. There are unlimited diabolical methods of killing soft targets.

They have very much succeeded in tying our national security system into knots, while simultaneously forcing American taxpayers to foot the bill, and the American media to continuously drive the disproportionate risk they supposedly pose to civilization deeper and deeper into everyone's minds.

In this way, and by using very little resources of their own, the terrorists (grouped generally together) are winning. They are getting exactly what they've always wanted. Now, with proposals like that of Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, to fight them by "carpet bombing" the Middle East, or rival Republican candidate Donald Trump to use the threat of "nuclear weapons on the table," simply completes the terrorist agenda and ties it up with a little red-state bow. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton probably would pull the status quo-line by showing she's tough and dumping even more money into "The War on Terror." I'm not familiar enough with the other Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders' view on this matter. But--while offering some fresh economic and social ideas, it is likely that he is still "establishment" enough to not depart heavily from maintaining some kind of symbolically high amount of funding in national defense.

As long as the ineffective and inefficient system feeds American tax money into the pockets of the billionaires, politicians, and corporation who exploit it, we will remain a fearful and misled nation with terrorist groups controlling us, keeping us hostage to our own dark media-led imaginations.

If we could only learn from the freedoms shown by the security ideals displayed in own national capital, and thence apply these to our thinking on a personal level, we could change the system, have more money and more individual freedom. But what about being attacked by ISIS? Wouldn't we be more vulnerable if we didn't dump 50,000 times more money to save 160 Americans a year from this hated group?

Here's the deal: ISIS grows and maintains itself by recruiting the disaffected members of the first world, and the poor, ignorant people of the poorer countries. It gives them hope and a feeling of belonging to a great cause, through indoctrination by the rarefied, radicalized religious, ideological militaristic interpretation of the Koran. But, don't fool yourself, this doesn't have anything to do with Islam. It's just a smokescreen that ISIS uses to give meaning where is none. The religious aspect of this kind of group ideology is, patently, a lie.

Fix the the first world culture (by making it more just and economically attractive), and you will have less (mostly) young men leaving it and fighting alongside groups like ISIS against it. In poorer countries, a more ethical model will be seen in the U.S. example, and education will improve. It is a package deal. Western society is improved, and the incentives that lead terrorist groups to oppose it will disappear.

Will we as Americans change our minds, by educating ourselves on the facts? I'm optimistic that we will, but it will take a hell of a lot more people explaining what those facts are, and even more people who are open minded enough to even ask the questions in the first place. I've done my best to explain what I have learned. It is up to you to decide whether you agree or not for yourself.

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I enjoyed my time in the sun...