"Have Americans become complacent (自满的) in the face of terrorism" asks The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin. The answer appears to be a qualified yes:
A Gallup poll released Monday—which was conducted early April—found zero percent of Americans volunteering "terrorism "’ as the country’s most important problem. Terrorism has ranked at 1 percent or below in six separate priorities polls" conducted before the Monday Gallup poll, compared to above 20 percent in the year after the attacks against the Worm Trade Center and Pentagon...
Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, said the fact that Americans have not been on a heightened state of alert recently shows that "life just normalised after the attacks and following the creation of a rather elaborate counterterrorism programme."
"That is the objective of effective policies, "Zelizer wrote in an e-mail.
Nicely put. The relevant question here seems to be: should Americans become complacent in the face of terrorism Or, to phrase it less provocatively: is "complacent" really the word we’re looking for here How about "calm", "level-headed", or "judicious" The bombing in Boston on Tuesday was gruesome, awful and pointless, and it naturally riveted the nation due to its attention-grabbing setting. But that kind of attention-grabbing setting is precisely what terrorists seek out, with the aim of distorting the public’s perceptions of the actual threat. Planting two bombs at the Boston Marathon is a sick, twisted act of mass murder, but it doesn’t necessarily augur (预示) any more widespread campaign of terrorism, and it doesn’t imply the need for major behavioural or policy changes.
Unsurprisingly, there are those who would find it politically useful to plunge Americans back into a state of paranoia (妄想狂). Steve King, a conservative congressman from Iowa, is trying to figure out some way to use the bombing to stem the tide of immigration reform. Ms Eilperin interviews Orrin Hatch, a Republican senator from Utah, and finds him in old 2002 mode: "You’re dealing with evil people who are very hard to control, and frankly there are sleeper agents that we’ve found in the past that have been here for years, and they show up and you had no idea." Sleeper agents I mean, there were those Russian ones, but frankly if the Kremlin wants to spend millions of rubles launching Anna Chapman’s modeling career, that doesn’t seem like anything the American people should be overly concerned about.
So far, the response to the bombings has been admirable precisely because it has been rather low-key. Politicians and most news agencies have refrained from speculating on the identity of the bombers. People have been loth to draw far-reaching conclusions in the absence of data. If the American people can maintain that dispassionate attitude, it could go a long way towards reducing the incentive for people to commit acts of terrorism in the first place. What can help discourage people from committing acts of terrorism according to the author