So what are we all afraid of?

These days it is a terrorist attack and all the mayhem, personal and political that comes in it's path.
We are down to living in mortal fear of a rocket propelled grenade attack on Madison Square Garden or the Fleet Center.
Or a savage train explosion a few days prior to the election.
Well...I dunno.
We used to be quite sanguine about living a mere forty minutes away from total nuclear annihilation.
Was the landscape dotted with unused fallout shelters when the Berlin Wall fell?
Indeed it was not.
I can recall with the simplest nostalgia the futile attempts by the Kennedy Administration to stimulate the public's interest in civil defense and fallout shelters.
Yet in the wake of murky new terror threats enunciated by the Attorney General, travel plans are being disrupted and people are stocking up on duct tape, flashlight batteries and whatnot else even as write this.
Maybe it's the immediacy of the whole thing that has us so scared.
Nuclear warfare was so all encompassing a prospect that most people simply shrugged it off and went on like nothing was happening.
George Orwell talks about the pervasive feeling of atomic fatalism after World War II.
Pretty much anyone in England at the time thought that nuclear warfare was bound to break out within ten or twenty years.
Nevertheless, with a simple shrug Orwell moves on to wondering whether or not Clement Atlee's labor government will ever abolish the House of Lords.
It's the small scale of terrorism that scares us. Somehow we thought that anything so huge as global thermonuclear war would be so "big" that it could never find an average citizen.
A sarin gas bomb though, going off in the subway....that seems emotionally and intellectually comprehensible.
And so we fret and worry as much about political fallout as the lingering effects of a dirty bomb.
Frankly I'm beginning to think we could all use a dose of fatalism.
It won't remove the danger but maybe the best we can hope for is to make it a little more livable.
Because the danger will be with us a good long time...so maybe we'd better get used to it.