Moving past a fear of terrorism

Daniel Akst is a member of the Newsday editorial board.

Now that American forces have slain Osama bin Laden, can the average person finally stop worrying about terrorism?

We can and we should, even in the New York area, which will always be a target. There are signs most Americans already had, even before the death of bin Laden. Gallup polls during the previous decade show a slowly diminishing level of concern moving forward from 9/11.

In all that time, there's been no significant attack on American soil, although several have been thwarted. But everyone knows that, sooner or later, one will succeed. So we ought to decide right now, in advance, that when terrorists strike again we'll just repair the damage, mourn the dead with dignity, and get on with life as quickly as we can.

Future attacks are unlikely to reach the scale of 9/11, thankfully, and in general the odds of any one person dying in such an event are vanishingly small -- which is why most people shouldn't worry.

That doesn't mean that, as a nation, we should let down our guard -- or let up in the pursuit of al-Qaida leaders. The organization bin Laden founded is far from vanquished, and the ease of terrorism in an open society will always make it tempting for our enemies.

That's why we need to learn from the past. As a nation, we ought to be more careful about how we respond to future attacks, zeroing in on the perpetrators instead of trying to rebuild entire countries. And as individuals, we'll have to take the very low possibility of encountering terrorism in stride.

Most people aren't very good at assessing risks, so now that bin Laden is gone it's useful to remind ourselves what kills most Americans -- including those in and around attack-prone New York.

The short answer is, diseases. And while terrorism is hard to combat, diseases are surprisingly easy. Even without highly trained Navy commandos to swoop down and take away your matches, you can easily avoid becoming one of the 443,000 Americans who die annually from smoking. The same goes for avoiding the many ills associated with obesity, although a team of Navy SEALs screaming "drop that fork and step away from the table!" could be quite effective.

The strangely heartening fact is that Americans are much better at killing Americans than al-Qaida is. Second-hand smoke, for instance, kills 46,000 nonsmokers annually via heart disease, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Homicide took 13,636 lives in 2009 -- most at the hands of family, friends and acquaintances. Another 10,839 were killed in alcohol-impaired car crashes.

SEALs aside, government can play a role. The best estimate of Americans who die for lack of universal health insurance is 45,000 a year. Given what we already spend on health care, all could be saved at no extra cost if we adopted the kind of nonprofit national health system used in every other comparable nation.

Worrying too much about terrorism can be tragically counterproductive. Cornell University economists found that as many as 2,300 extra deaths occurred following 9/11 because so many travelers drove instead of flying -- flying is safer. One of the economists, bemoaning the consequences when people improperly assess risk, said that when she saw the number in her study, "my heart sank."

Let's not encourage our enemies to believe that, by inflicting violence here at home, they can turn our society upside down, drain our treasury and win the world's attention. Terrorism is just one of life's risks, and not an especially big one.