It sounds like a strange suggestion, an insensitive one, but it’s time to start ignoring terrorism. John Kerry stated that Islamic State is as big a threat as Climate Change, obviously he does not know to much about climate change.
US deaths cause, 2015
Suicide: 43,000
Motor accidents 32,000
Gun homicide: 13,286
Domestic violence: 1,600
Islamic terrorism: 19
Sharks: 1— The Int'l Spectator (@intlspectator) July 27, 2016
Terrorism is shocking, but mostly because the media make sure we don’t miss any terrorist event. It is because we desire to see news that shocks us with things that happen elsewhere, because we don’t realize it is not in our lives, not in our world these things happen.
Focus on the problems you can fix
Islamic State may kill another thousand people in bombings this year, of course we don’t want that to happen, but if it does then it still doesn’t constitute the biggest threat we face. We can list the abuse of alcohol, the pollution through fossil fuel use, drug abuse, weapons in the hands of the wrong people, cars as much bigger threats. Also us being confronted with these crimes does not really instruct us what to do. It makes us feel powerless, and we need to feel powerfull to fight climate change.
To compare IS with climate change is really not getting climate change, but it does possibly result in the right behaviour, namely that we fight IS as hard as we fight climate change. This is because IS threatens order, it causes priorities to lie with its destruction, not with fighting climate change or reducing fossil fuel use. It is a tool in the hands of those that want to keep us occupied with war, which can lead to more war, instead of replacing the thing people fight for and over, namely fossil fuels.
We need to ignore terrorism, reduce it’s prominence in the media, and at the same time let our police and intelligence agencies look for it, find it and neutralize it, while the normal citizen needs more information on how to prevent attacks, for instance how do you scope out a place so you know it can’t be attacked. How do you recognize a bomber?
We are in a transition, and it is the desire of those that like the status quo to distract us with useless information, to scare us with meaningless concepts like ‘the economy’. It is natural to desire to see death and destruction, we are fascinated by it, movies make billions showing it to us. But we need to focus on the transition to renewables, on securing our food production, on shutting down and controlling fossil fuel companies and banks. They are the major threat we face. The fight against them should be headline news every damn day until we control them.