For the longest time, I thought about terrorism from a security standpoint. If you treat the US as a system to break, then you see a lot of weak points: bridges, trains, malls, etc (in other words, the stuff you see on 24). If you damage these, you could do a whole lot of damage to the US economy, kill a lot of people, etc. But then I realized something: destroying bridges doesn't cause fear in the same way that, say, flying a plane into a landmark building does.

I used to think that the terrorists were idiots that couldn't pull off a simple attack... now I realize just how good they are at what they do: causing fear. The point of terrorism isn't to kill, it isn't to cause direct harm in any way. Those are tools to make us scared, and we've all played right into it. I'll never forget exactly where I was when I found out about the attacks on 9/11, or any of the resulting protection mechanisms; they succeeded in their goals, probably more than they ever thought they would.