Abstract

Orange Alert at Sebago

The United States' homeland security efforts are like a burlesque of the cold war struggle--randomly throwing money at the problem, periodically issuing dire alerts and indulging expensive versions of old-fashioned silliness. Officials have prepared for the worst on Sebago Lake, in Maine. Sebago supplies drinking water for Portland--imagine a deadly virus in the hands of bad people. On March 11, 2004, explosions ripped through commuter trains in Madrid, Spain, killing almost 200 people and injuring more than 1,500. In the U.S., officials pondered an embarrassing question: What about our trains? Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced plans for rapid-deployment dogs at train stations, also a "pilot program" to test the feasibility of screening all rail passengers and their luggage. Actually, in terms of worldwide terrorist attacks, the most popular target is buses. The eager politics of tightening antiterrorist security perversely pushes the risk from one venue to another, from one set of potential victims to others just as innocent. The "war on terrorism" itself will produce random injury and death--inadvertently, of course--because the spending will deform and undermine the country's other priorities. The public health system, for example, has long been starved of adequate funding. Public health priorities are thus determined not by how many people are at risk but by how rare the poisons are that might kill citizens, and which fiendish actors wish to kill them.