Everything's Terror In The United States Of Hysteria

Even though there's been no actual terror in six years and you're more likely to get struck by lightning
By Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Jul. 19, 2007

As soon as news filtered out of a steam pipe blast in Manhattan yesterday evening, everyone's first thought was terrorism, proving once again that in the six terror free years since 9/11, the Bush administration has created a United States of hysteria - and handed the terrorists a victory they could never have achieved alone - changing our very way of life.

Investment banker Heiko Thieme summed up the situation yesterday, telling the media, "Everybody was a bit confused, everybody obviously thought of 9/11," following a underground steam pipe explosion that sent smoke billowing into the late afternoon New York skyline.

Yesterday's events, though tragic for those injured and the one person that died, were reminiscent of last year's incident in Washington D.C., where huge swathes of the city as well as schools and other buildings were evacuated and shut down after a construction drill was mistaken for gunfire in the Capitol Hill area.

The opportunity to parade SWAT teams, sniffer dogs, police with assault weapons and armed FBI tactical units wearing flak jackets did not go to waste on that occasion and the reaction was another damning indictment and a realization that the "terrorists" have won - they have changed our way of life and turned us into spineless scaredy cats who immediately panic at any loud noise.

This is akin to the Vietnam vet who, returning home from conflict, nearly had a heart attack every time a bus backfired. In that case, the soldier had every justification to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder - he had seen his friends die and had had people shooting at him every day, but can average Americans really cite the same excuse, or has the simple formula of constant fearmongering on behalf of the Bush administration turned the nation into a legion of mentally damaged jellyfish?

The Fear: It certainly looked like a scene from 9/11, but how much does rampant government fearmongering play into the mindset that every loud bang is a terror attack, when there hasn't been one in the U.S. for six years?

In reality, you're more likely to get killed by peanut allergies, accident causing deer or lightning strikes than acts of terrorism. To equal the danger that Americans place themselves in every day by driving their car down the highway, there would have to be a 9/11 every month. To reach the same level of risk that one undertakes in boarding an airline, you only have to travel eleven miles in a car.

Reports of suspicious packages that routinely turn out to be dirty diapers or packs of sandwiches have doubled since 9/11, swamping police and bomb disposal teams and distracting them should there be any real threat.

There hasn't been a terror attack inside America for nearly six years and yet everyone's first thought whenever something's amiss is that it's terrorism, when in every case since 9/11, be it Corey Lidle's errant Cirrus SR20 plane striking a Manhattan apartment block or the ridiculous farce of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force advertising campaign, nothing is going on except the runaway paranoia generated solely by our government's promise that a new attack in inevitable and imminent.

Those responsible for inoculating America with this collective paranoia is of course the U.S. government, who have done their utmost to beef up "Al-Qaeda" to a level of influence they could have never achieved without the added relentless PR drive of the Neo-Cons and the sycophantic sensationalist media.

This climate of foreboding creates the very kind of society the "terrorists" hope to master, where freedoms are casually violated as some kind of token sacrifice to the Fear God, all at the behest of a government that continues to function solely on the unifying force of an imagined outside threat.