Alex's Alliterative Adventures

I realize that this is a day late, and for that I’m sorry.

Yesterday I had a great conversation with Jenn about the great tragedy that 9/11 has become. The tragedy is that honest, hard working American citizens are STILL hung up on something that happened 5 years ago.  The USA has been turned completely upside down because a few terrorists got exactly what they wanted, they caused the strongest nation in the world to curl up into a little ball and lead its citizens into a brave new world of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.  Let me make myself clear:  9/11 was a terrible thing.  Roughly 3000 people losts their lives to a bunch of sick nutjobs whose twisted mental state lead them to believe that killing thousands of innocent people was the unquestionably right thing to do. It is a day that should be remembered for those who were murdered.

One thing 9/11 is not is proof that those crazy terrorists are going to kill us all. Let’s put things in perspective.

• The estimated number of deaths attributable to obesity each year in the US is approximately 280,000 
• The annual death rate from traffic accidents hit a record low (per person) in 2004 at 42,800 deaths
• 30,622 people committed suicide in 2001. Even if you attribute all of those suicides to 9/11, the article goes on to say that suicide made up 1.3% of the total deaths that year.  29% were from heart diseases and 23% were from cancer
• The tsunami that hit Indonesia in 2005 killed over 200,000 people
• The US Department of state reports that 56 US citizens were killed worldwide as a result of “incidents of terrorism” (you can also check out the entire report)

All of these things cause way more death and harm than any terrorist could ever hope to.  I wouldn’t be surprised if terrorists secretly worship Ronald McDonald. Yet 9/11 still has people worked up into a frenzy, but obesity is shrugged off when it kills almost 100 times more people each year than 9/11 did.

A poster on slashdot, a geek news site, ran some numbers and came to the conclusion that the average person is less likely to be killed by terrorism than they would have of winning the lottery if they played once a week for 52 years.  Now admittedly random people on the internet and their calculations are not to be trusted, but I’d say it puts things in the right ballpark.

An analysis of the recent liquid bomb scare came to the conclusion that it was completely unfeasable for anyone to do significant damage to a plane using TATP, one of the alleged explosives in the plot. The responses to these events by governments and people around the world have simply been shocking.

Anyways, that’s my rant.  Feel free to delete the past post from your brain. I should include the disclaimer: This is my opinion, it is not fact.  It is not necessarily right or valid in any way.  I got my figures from the internet, which is a dubious source at best.  I’m also an uneducated middle-class guy. Take all of this with a grain of salt.