Violence at Home: Fear Of The Neighbor Terrorist

Gun Violence Rears its Head One More Time

The horrific attacks in Texas underscored a feeling for me of being horrified at how vulnerable we all are, whether it’s our children at school or a homegrown terrorist attack while at the store or an event.

The police call these events “soft targets:” places where people gather and are unprotected and particularly vulnerable.

I shop, I go to malls, and my husband and I travel, and we attend events. A couple of years ago, I questioned whether I would go to any San Francisco Super Bowl events as the San Francisco Chronicle had published several stories about the security concerns at the game.

I didn’t have tickets to the game, but there were a lot of festivities around to participate in that were “game” featured. It was a dilemma about how comfortable I would be in the middle of Super Bowl activities with thousands of people milling about.

My friends at our local Homeland Security officials said they began working on security a year before the game.

I don’t like to give up my life and my routines to worry about being in the middle of a homegrown terrorist attack. Yet, when story after story appears about just folk being murdered for attending church or a music concert, even just shopping, it begins to wear on me.

Terrorism works when it inspires profound fear. However, the Washington Post wrote that I’m more likely to be injured or die running, falling furniture, or driving than being attacked by a terrorist. It gave a very sobering comparison that while the Paris attacks killed 130 people, about three times that number of French citizens died on that same day from cancer.

It helped, but not completely. If I still had children in school, I’d not feel so comfortable with those statistics.

A news report found that as school shootings continue to make national headlines, parents fearful of the next mass killer are pulling their kids out of schools in growing numbers, according to home education groups. Some parents are temporarily leaving careers to homeschool their children, fearing that dropping their kids off at school could potentially place them in danger.

I wrote a book review for the New York Journal of Books a couple of years ago about the Boston Marathon Bombings, Maximum Harm: The Tsarnaev Brothers, The FBI, and the Road to the Marathon Bombing by Michele McPhee. She tells the story of the Tsarnaev brothers and their life in the United States.

I wrote: “After their parents fled Russia and settled in Cambridge, MA, the boys attended the Rindge and Latin high school, considered one of the best in the country. Indeed, Dzhokhar was enrolled in Introduction to Ethics at UMass Dartmouth. The family was granted political asylum, and Dzhokhar became an American citizen. However, Tamerlan never entirely made citizenship, although it was something he desperately wanted.

“Instead, both became U.S. Counterterrorism’s biggest nightmare: Homegrown terrorists.”

Terror next door

When we worry about who is coming across the border, what are we doing to deal with the disaffected kid next door?

The statistic that floats around in my head is a study that since 9/11, homegrown terrorists have killed more than five times as many Americans as Islamists have.

Again, since 9/11, on average, approximately six terrorist plots in one year have been carried out by American Muslims, resulting in 50 fatalities, according to the New York Times. Yet, here at home, the number of attacks by right-wing extremists is about 30 a year, totaling 337, between 2001 and 2012, resulting in 254 fatalities, according to the Combating Terrorism Center, a privately funded think tank at West Point.

I don’t want to live in fear. Yet, when I see what happens when ordinary citizens gather together, I begin looking around me in the train station, subway, or airport to see who may have on bulky clothes in the summer or just a bit too twitchy and sweaty.

And attacks are not always guns or bombs. Lately, we have seen people use their cars as weapons, such as in the attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, where James Alex Fields Jr. used his Dodge Challenger to mow down a group of protesters. Another event that marks the growing violence of America’s far-right wing.

It’s just sad.

It’s sad that so many people are angry and feel disenfranchised by our society.

Sadly, we don’t want to know who are neighbors are and how we are more alike than not.

I want to think this will change when we all get tired of being afraid and are ready to do something about it.