Compared with the threat that was hanging over us during the age of Mutual Assured Destruction, what we're up against now is pretty mild stuff.

Planes, sky-scrapers, trains, nightclubs, perhaps a dirty bomb in a city somewhere...Horrifying and tragic, sure. But we aren't talking about thousands of nuclear warheads on all our cities and a Nuclear Winter, are we?

If we could shrug it off all those years and keep on living our luves and raising our families in spite of it all, this latest thing isn't worth losing too much sleep over, or allowing it to distort the way we live too much. And we should recognise when there are people trying to take advantage of the situation to strengthen their hold on power.