A Little Terror Never Hurt Anyone

An Opinion Column by Frank Finger

There's lots of whining going on right now about the Underwear Bomber, the man who allegedly burned himself slightly on a flight inbound from Amsterdam to the U.S. Yes, it's true he might have been trying to blow up the plane. But it's also true that he didn't blow up the plane. People were scared, sure, but a little terror never hurt anyone.

Terrorism "works" because fear is a natural human emotion. If I were to terrorize you right now, surely you too would be scared. And studies have shown that people who are scared are more alert, and more apt to deal with surprises than people who are calm and happy.

Look, there's a bomb behind you!

See? That's scary. But you paid attention to what I was saying, didn't you. And if there really was a bomb behind you, you would know about it now, and you would be saved. And you would never, ever forget me, the man who put it there and then saved you.

Maybe if we listened more to what the terrorists had to say to us, we would learn lessons. Not just about them, but about ourselves. But unfortunately in this, the Twenty-Teens, the decade of Facebook, Twitter, and hey-look-at-what-I'm-doing-right-now-because-I'm-so-important-and-I-make-just-enough-money-to-feed-and-clothe-my-family-so-I'm-better-than-you, we no longer listen. We're a country full of selfish angry buffoons, wiling away the hours with our video games, our social tea, our house purchases, our GPS enabled planet-wrecking automobiles, and our greedy carbon-producing jobs.

On any given day, you probably care more about what your so-called "boss" tells you to do than what some poor unfortunate brown person in an oppressed country thinks about your misguided Western ways. And that's the real crime here. The bottom line is, we in America are the true criminals. We're the terrorists. We're the occupiers. We're the people we should be pointing our fingers at. But we don't.

Mistakes happen. People aren't perfect. Our elected leaders are not psychic deities that know every second of every day how to stop every single terrorist from ever getting on a plane. What should they do? Stop everybody who seems a little bit suspicious? And who defines "suspicious", anyway?

People could carry powder in their groin for any number of personal reasons. You want to go pulling a guy aside just because he doused his itchy jock in Gold Bond and it's pouring down his leg on his way through the metal detector, you go ahead and violate his rights. Then see if you can sleep at night, Mussolini.

So the next time you want to blame President Obama, or DHS or some other government agency that you now suddenly want to baby you like a helpless kid in some swaddle, stop complaining, take a deep breath and then put the real blame for everything that's wrong with the world where it actually belongs - yourself.

And if there's time, Bush.

Frank Finger is a five-time Pulitzer winning conservative columnist who writes for The Mega Independent. And he's just been nominated for another Pulitzer for the above column, so make it six, baby.