Cognitive Therapy for the Country

The message of these attacks is powerful: You are not safe anywhere.

That, after all, is the whole point of terrorism: to subvert our sense of the normal, to make us afraid of improbable dangers and invite us, in our fear, to overreact in ways that are destructive to our lifestyle and that will not make us any safer.

.. The fact that Americans are far more likely to die in a car accident than in a terrorist attack is cold comfort for most people. Likewise, try telling someone who just read a story in the news about a plane crash killing hundreds of people that he or she is more likely to die on the way to the airport in a car than by leaving it in an airplane. Of course, it’s true, but it won’t make you feel safer.

.. Cognitive therapy identifies mistaken and distorted thoughts that generate distress, and then challenges and corrects them. What the president needs to say to all Americans — over and over — is that although terrible, unpredictable things have happened, the country is not in peril. Such attacks are incapable of destroying us or coming close to bringing down Western civilization.

.. There is no way to eradicate risk in a free society, even if we are willing to trade some of our liberty for safety. We delude ourselves to think otherwise.