Homeland Security

There's an old joke about two hunters being chased by a bear. As they're running, one hunter says to the other, "Do you really think you can outrun than that bear?" To which the second hunter replies, "I don't need to outrun the bear; I just need to outrun you."

The moral of the story being that, when faced with a threat, one does not need impregnable defenses. It is enough that someone else--anyone else--has more pregnable defenses than yours. Threats most often follow the path of least resistance. We could build a moat around our home and fill it with ill-tempered sea bass and install blast doors around the perimeter and be totally secure, or we can just make sure the neighbors are more tempting targets than we are for the prowlers.

Which brings me to the current dust-up over the Homeland Security budget, specifically, how federal security funds are allocated. The 9-11 commission recommended that HS dollars be allocated strictly on the basis of "risk and need." The Senate has voted that 60% of the budget be allotted on the risk/need grounds, but that each state gets a minimum chunk of the remaining 40%. For some reason, Wyoming is cited most often as an egregious example of how out of whack the guaranteed-minimum concept is, as in "Wyoming gets more per capita than New York."* If I hear that one more time, I am liable to vomit in the metal detector. Put that through your residue checker.

Let me start by stating the obvious. Of course putting Homeland Security money on the table is going to invite a money-grab. Every community is strapped for cash. There is always something a state, county, town, or even household would do if only there was money there. It should come as no surprise to anyone that, when federal funds are on the table, no matter what the source, everyone is going to want to grab as much of that for his or her home community as possible. Pork is only pork to people who aren't benefitting from it. To people who are, it is necessary community improvements.

Furthermore, allow me to state another obvious fact: every community thinks there is something in their environs that would make a tempting terrorist target. On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was waiting tables in a reasonably crappy restaurant in a suburb of Toledo, Ohio. I have actually heard people use Toledo, Ohio in a sentence as a synonym for "The middle of nowhere." Nonetheless, as we listened to the radio reports that morning while the fourth plane was still unaccounted for, I was bringing coffee to people who honestly, seriously believed that fourth airplane was headed straight for Toledo, planning to crash into the BP oil refinery. That sentiment is silly to people in New York, but people in that diner that morning believed it in all earnest.

People in low-population, so-called "low-risk" areas do not like to believe that they are at any less risk than people in New York or LA. After all, one of the lessons shoved down our collective throats after September 11 was that it could happen here. That message has been getting to everyone, even in Wyoming. Sparsely populated areas took that to heart just as much as major metro areas. I don't think any of the talking heads in the big cities considered that, for people in Bat Guano, Nebraska, "it can happen here," meant here, in Bat Guano, Nebraska, not here in some big city that coincidentally shares a federal government. We've been told for going on four years now that we are not safe. We as in us, personally, ourselves, not Americans as a whole.

Back to the hunters running from the bear in the woods. When major metropolitan areas, having received the bulk of security funding, become too difficult to operate in, who know where the next target would be. Maybe someone will nuke Yellowstone or blast Washington's face right off Mount Rushmore. Maybe someone will taint our food supply through the farmlands of Kansas or the herds of cattle in Nebraska. Maybe they'll go for the farm country of Oregon and unleash some filbert-centric pathogen that will destroy our supply of Hazelnut lattes. There is a mindset among some in the Midwest that a terrorist strike in the heartland would be more effective at undermining our sense of homeland security than another attack on a big coastal metropolis.

The thing to remember about risk is that it is by nature relative. Eventually, we may make our big cities safer, but that doesn't make the bad guys go away. Low-risk areas are only low-risk now because there are higher-risk areas elsewhere. Sparsely populated areas are running from the bear faster than the densely-populated areas at the moment, but the bear gets one of them in the end. The arguments over Homeland Security allocation are just 50 states trying to make sure they're running faster than someone.


*-Wyoming also gets more Presidential votes per capita than New York, but that doesn't seem to inspire people to action the way doling out cash does.