Many people don’t travel because they’re scared. They’re scared of the great unknown. Of places that are unfamiliar, filled with people that take some effort to understand. They’re scared of pickpockets, of muggers, of bombs, of rifle-toting madmen.
Unfortunately, staying home won’t eliminate those risks.
The news coming from Mumbai is horrible, it’s shocking, and it makes most anyone with a pulse a bit afraid. That’s the whole purpose of “terrorism”: to inspire terror.
Most Muslim terrorists want to eliminate progress and turn back the clock to a time when women knew their place or were stoned if they didn’t. To a time when tribal desert leaders with the right lineage made all the rules and religious men held all the power. A time when progress was measured by the number of camels in a herd. So they don’t want to see the effects of free thought, free movement, or anything else that complicates their narrow views. They target the heretics and if hundreds of people get killed in the crossfire, too bad. They’re branded as fanatics, but when there are this many fanatics thinking murder is okay, how do you prevent it without drastic profiling?
Also, how do you decide where to live, or where to travel? You can’t just avoid places where “the bad people live.” Targets shift and are random. If it’s not the Muslim terrorists getting you in Morocco, England, Spain, Bali, New York, or Mumbai, it may be a disturbed college student with a gun in Finland or a crazy churchgoer in America deciding to take out a congregation. It may be a gang war gone amok in St. Louis or drug cartel shootout in Mexico. Watch your local news each night for a week and you’ll have plenty to add to this list.
India’s tourism will drop through the floor for a while, then it will come back. Just as it has come back in England, Spain, Egypt, and Bali. Because thankfully, the terrorists never win a lasting victory. Those decadent tourists and business travelers just delay their trip or travel elsewhere. There’s temporary pain—and a lot of senseless loss of life—but in the end nothing really gets accomplished unless they get a thrill out of seeing more security guards and seeing us take off our shoes at the airport. Most of us will keep traveling.
We’ll look at the odds, take a calculated risk, and see that going abroad isn’t really more risky than driving to work each day, working at Wal-mart , living near a river or ocean, or living near a forest in California.
P.S. – According to this New York Times story , Americans and Brits were not targeted in the attacks as was widely reported in the news. Far more Indians died than foreigners and it appears that the attackers were pure cold-blooded killers, shooting the elderly and children as well. Is there a separate level of Hell for these types?
