First off, you used inflammatory language with the word "paranoia." Fear is reasonable; paranoia is not. Second, your analogy is not apt because you cannot eq

First off, you used inflammatory language with the word "paranoia." Fear is reasonable; paranoia is not. Second, your analogy is not apt because you cannot equate the fear felt by an individual with the fear felt by a populace. Only one person has input into the former; many have input into the latter and they all, as individuals, exercise it in different ways. Third, you did not respond to my point. I was not dismissing the fear; I was dismissing our paranoid response to it. Fear of an attack is reasonable. Fear of "looking insecure" is not. They are different. The former would have done things like streamlined intelligence gathering and looked into the myriad causes of attacks intended to create a terror response. The latter bans nationals of a handful of countries--but not the one whose nationals were responsible for the Big Attack we so fear--as a knee-jerk response. On the gripping hand, we won't do the former because we may just find that the terrorists look a lot different from who we think they look like.