The musician Randy Newman had a song a few years back with the passage, “A president once said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Now we’re supposed to be afraid. It’s patriotic, in fact, color-coded. And what are we supposed to be afraid of? Why, being afraid! That’s what terror means, doesn’t it?”
Now New York Times columnist Tim Egan has a similar take. In a piece headlined, “What to be afraid of,” Egan totes up all the money the U.S. has spent in fear of terrorism, and compares the actual danger of dying at the hands of terrorists against other, less headline-grabbing dangers. “Your burger is a bigger threat than radical islam,” he writes.
Alzheimer’s, for example, kills 864,000 Americans a year, yet annual federal research on the disease is just $562 million. To put that in perspective, Egan says, the country spent almost 20 times that amount, around $10 billion, on the National Security Agency.
