When to be afraid in times of terror

It's difficult to imagine what parents tell their children these days about terrorism.

Our sons are grown men and have solid rationales about life and the perils that abound.

All I can say is that my childhood didn't include worrying about bombs in pressure cookers.

What we worried about in my growing-up years may seem trivial by comparison, but our fears tended to be real, for the most part.

For example, many of you can relate to the potential dangers of outhouses, including stinging insects and snakes. If there was a bogeyman afoot in the darkness, we didn't worry about him much. A copperhead was enough to occupy our minds.

And there was that gang of red paper wasps that, no matter how many times we tore it down, always built its nest over the screen door going into the back porch.

Let me tell you a thing or two about red wasps. They're mean.

Other insects tend to leave you alone if you leave them alone. That's fair, I think. But red wasps will attack anything that comes close to their nests.

A red wasp's sting is painful, but if you're allergic to wasp stings, as I am, the initial pain is nothing compared to the swelling that follows.

I remember being stung on the top of my foot once. I was unable to wear a shoe on that foot for a few days. Try milking a cow and doing other farm chores with no shoe on one foot.

In the mid-1970s my wife and I noticed a beautiful wild orange butterfly weed growing along a country lane near Nevada, Missouri, on the western edge of the state. We decided to dig it up and transplant the colorful weed to our yard.

When I got close to the blooming weed, armed with a shovel, I realized the blossoms on the bush were covered with red wasps.

Angry red wasps.

What I faced was real terror. If those wasps started stinging me, I was a goner. I threw down the shovel and ran as fast as I could. Apparently, when I am terrorized, I can run faster than a swarm of red wasps. Thank goodness.

I suppose that shovel is still there -- or at least the metal part. The wood handle probably rotted a long time ago.

I don't pretend that a confrontation with red wasps is the same as what happens to victims of terrorist bombs. But I can tell you that for the first half of my life I never gave terrorists a second thought, whereas I thought about red wasps just about every time I stepped outdoors.

Fear is fear.

One fear many parents instilled in their children after World War II had to do with the A-bomb.

Radiation from A-bomb tests, not to mention the end-of-war bombings in Japan, left radiation swimming in the atmosphere, our parents warned. And there were certain precautions we should take.

For example, the first snow of winter was unfit for making snow ice cream, we learned, because it took a good snowstorm to wash some of the radiation out of the sky. So even if the first snow was a fluffy snow, perfect for ice cream, we couldn't eat it.

But we could eat snow from any subsequent winter storms. The thinking was it only took that first blizzard to make snow safe to eat.

Most of us avoided that first snow. We didn't eat it. We didn't play in it. We didn't touch the icicles that draped down from the roof of the house.

Fear is fear.

Red wasps and radioactive snow are real things. We know where and what they are. We can tell our children how to minimize any danger to us of either of those things.

Not so with terrorists.

And that's the biggest weapon a terrorist uses: uncertainty.

It is the terrorist's aim to make us alter our lives in ways that would limit our creativity and spunk and honor. In addition to the injuries and death that result from terrorism, the overall aim is to paralyze innocent human beings.

Certain religions hold the belief that our existence on this planet is preordained by an ultimately superior being who has from the beginning of creation documented when we would be born. And when we would die.

Most of the time we don't think about this. But terrorism has giving us occasion to ponder life. And death.

Parents can do a fair job of protecting their children from red wasps and radiation-laced snow. They can also help their children understand that today is another opportunity to change the world, literally.

Whatever we achieve today will have a lasting effect. Hiding from terrorism is the worst possible reaction.

Here is one more thing to be said about terrorism:

After those planes crashed on Sept. 11, 2001, there were a lot of fingers pointed at this agency and that agency over lack of communication and adequate preparedness.

But think about this. The man believed to be behind last weekend's bombings is in custody. Just like every other bomber involved in terrorist acts in the past 15 years in the United States.

To me, this is a pretty amazing record, particularly when you throw in the number of terrorists acts that have been thwarted over that same time span.

Hats off to all those agencies whose job it is to keep us safe. Hats off to parents who help their children deal with the uncertainties of today.

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.