Best way to fight terror? Turn off your TV and get back to real life

By David McElroy · April 18, 2013

There are a lot of people who want you to be scared and obsessed with public safety right now. I’d like to suggest that it’s in your best interest — and the best interest of everyone around you — to turn your television off and quit obsessively following the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing.

If you live in Boston or if you have family there or if you somehow have such a personal tie, I understand that you want to keep up with it more than the rest of us. That’s understandable. It’s a local story for you, and it affects you in a personal way. But for the rest of us — the vast majority — it’s worse than a waste of time. It’s creating exactly what terrorists want. (I’m calling the perpetrator of the bombing a terrorist on the assumption that creating terror was his intent. I’m not implying anything about who it might have been or what the person’s cause might be. Because I don’t know.)

Terrorists want you to be scared. Pure and simple. They want you to be looking over your shoulder and wondering when something bad might happen again. They want you to wonder whether it might be in your city next time. They want you to eventually feel that you’re willing to do anything to convince them to leave you alone.

Politicians want you to be scared. They wouldn’t word it that way, of course, but they like people to be scared because it allows them to seize more power. The increased power and budgets of the federal “security” bureaucrats over the last 12 years or so are perfect examples. Before Sept. 11, 2001, Americans wouldn’t have stood for the privacy invasions that were foisted on us. But scared people go along with such intrusions, because we tell ourselves it will make us safer.

Television networks want you to be scared. They want you to watch what they’re beaming into your world, because the more you watch, the more money they can make. (And ratings are way up this week for cable news.) It’s a simple calculus of entertainment for them. If millions of people wanted to watch one-handed midget bowlers play chess between bowling rounds, they’d be happy to put that on the air. They don’t much care what they broadcast — as long as you’re watching. And they’ve learned that if they can make you believe you’re in danger, you’re going to watch. I’ve written before that news has changed in terrible ways, becoming nothing more than an extension of entertainment. It scares me what it’s become, and it scares me that people pay so much attention to it. I think we’re generally better off without it.

Unless you have a direct stake in what’s going on in Boston, you have no reason to be afraid. What happened shouldn’t affect you. If the rest of the country went about its business without batting an eye — and if television ratings went down when networks filled their time with titillating fluff and speculation — the terrorists would find their tactic didn’t work, politicians would find themselves unable to take advantage of us, and TV execs might have to figure out some other way to fill up their time. (I’ve argued before that we all ought to turn off television, so I’m not convinced they’d find anything better. But that’s a different issue.)

I’ve heard some people say they’re watching the coverage because it’s entertaining. That’s their right, of course. I’ve had others say they watch because it helps them keep an eye out for politicians trampling on our freedoms. Watching it happen and being aware of it has really made a big difference in the last 12 years or so, hasn’t it?

I suggest that you’ll be happier if you concentrate on your own life and quit worrying so much about things you can’t control. I think it’s healthier for us to focus on our families and friends — and on finding ways to accomplish the things that matter to us. You’re obviously free to disregard my suggestion, but I think you’d be happier.

People want you to be afraid. They can’t achieve that if you refuse to be sucked in to the black hole of uncertain media coverage. So turn off your television. Pay attention to real life that’s relevant to you. We’ll all be happier and more secure if we do that.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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