By Charley Reese reese.king-online.com

The federal government keeps warning us about terrorist threats. They include supposed threats against national monuments, nuclear power plants and bridges.
Well, so what?

What are we supposed to do? Call up our local power plant and volunteer to guard the nuclear generators? Should we form a human ring around the Statue of Liberty? Should we maintain 24-hour-a-day sit-ins on the Brooklyn Bridge? Fact is, there is nothing we ordinary folks can do about alleged terrorism. About 90 percent of this war on terrorism is turning out to be pure eyewash. The director of homeland security, Tom Ridge, has zero power — which means, in Washington, zero influence.

It's a heck of a note that 3,000 Americans had to die before someone in Washington noticed that the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration, to name a few, were all screwed up. And you know what? They still are. If you want somebody to blame, blame politics and affirmative action. When people are hired or appointed for purely political reasons or to fill in the blanks on some color-coded chart, you aren't going to get any top people except by pure accident.

If you feel safe getting on an airliner just because you've been through the hassles of airport security, you're a victim of misleading information. By and large, airport security people are the same ones who were there prior to Sept. 11. All that's changed is the source of their paycheck. It now comes from the taxpayers instead of the airlines. In the meantime, literally hundreds of people at every major airport have access to the supposedly secure areas, including the planes themselves, and they don't go through any security checks.

And, of course, the federal government, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that airline pilots may not carry firearms. They will just have to depend on federal security measures. In truth, however, other than the awareness on the part of the pilots and passengers that they'd better fight any would-be hijackers, everything is basically as it was before, except for the additional hassles and delays.

Your best protection is that there aren't as many terrorists in the world as the Bush administration would have you believe, nor are the terrorists all that smart or well-trained. Nevertheless, the federal government should cut out these useless warnings. What they really are is just the old bureaucratic game of covering your backside. Government officials are afraid that if they don't say anything and something happens, they'll be blamed. So they say something that is utterly useless and accomplishes nothing except to add to people's anxiety.

The way the press works these days, whether officials say something or don't say something, they're going to get blamed anyway. Journalists seem to have adopted the trial lawyer's mentality that no matter what happens, somebody is to blame for it. So unless the feds have specific information that can result in specific countermeasures, they ought to just keep their mouths shut.

Risks, like pretty much everything these days, are greatly distorted in the media. We are all at a much greater risk of dying in our automobiles or from eating too much and lying around on the couch than we are at the hands of a terrorist. People tend to forget that while al-Qaida murdered about 3,000 Americans, homegrown American criminals murder about 19,000 of us each and every year.

My advice is to relax and go on with your normal life. Leave cop work to the cops, spy-catching to spy-catchers and guard work to the guards. Never worry about things you can't control.

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