This country suffered a huge terrorist attack last week, one that will no doubt keep our country riddled with fear for years.

The terrorist attack was brutal, and its effects are only starting to take root. Like all good attacks, we didn’t see it coming, because we were afraid of something else.

Like Run DMC might say, it’s tricky — because it’s pretending to fight terrorism, but without terrorism, it cannot survive, and never would have been born.

Before everyone starts jumping to conclusions, there is a distinction that needs to be made clear.

There’s something missing from the national vernacular — a little vocabulary lesson that nearly everyone is missing. Osama bin Laden is not a terrorist. Whether he personally had gone to kill each of the thousands that died on Sept. 11 or whether he provided a bankroll and a plan, there is no terrorism in that man. He is a murderer, and a particularly vicious one at that.

There are a set of terrorists bombarding this soil. They’re called government officials and the mass media. For 14 months, we have lived with daily news of al-Qaida being linked to yet another attack. This new terrorist attack was the government mandate that from now until our nation’s annihilation at the hands of terrorists, there will be a Department of Homeland Security.

From this day forth, there is a group that will purvey terror from every pore by threatening Americans with the dangers of international ideologues with missiles, anthrax or different views.

Terrorism by definition intimidates, it coerces. It aims to convince people to change the way they live. It often employs acts or threats of violence, like the United States has been lobbing at Iraq for the past decade.

Murder, on the other hand, doesn’t need to convince. It simply makes sure people change the way they live their lives by making them not live them at all. That’s why Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida make terrorists of the most pathetic sort. They didn’t have time to terrify; they slaughtered people before the victims knew what was going on.

Somehow, that’s led us to this. Creating a department that will simply exist to scare us.

While we focus ourselves on ridding the earth of Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, we forget that we’ve never seen the real tragedies coming. No one predicts the huge earthquakes, Columbine or the massive attacks like Sept. 11. Those that do are generally so vague that they can’t help but be right. When there are groups like Homeland Security working round the clock to warn us about al-Qaida, it’s inevitable that they’ll simply forget that there are other terrorists out there.

Enjoy your Department of Homeland Security. They’re doing a pretty foul job so far, because all of a sudden our national forests are being looted, and Lockheed Martin will almost certainly receive another $200 billion for planes that might work well against state-of-the-art planes, but are pretty useless against an airliner or a briefcase of smallpox. Thankfully, none of us will know about these things, because they’re separate departments and there are many narrow niches to put all those hard-earned tax dollars in.

It’s a fitting conclusion to a nation that has sacrificed so much. Thousands died on September 11, thousands of servicemen find themselves away for yet another Thanksgiving and everyone has a lot less room to wander around in the Fourth Amendment. Plus the new budget slashes the EPA and agriculture, to add money to a Department of Defense that already has enough nuclear weapons to render themselves useless ten times over and all sorts of technology that is useless for fighting enemies who don’t have access to Cray supercomputers or tons of weapons-grade plutonium.

So, in case you’re wondering why there’s been no news not related to al-Qaida, it might be because the people most likely to harm your proud American traditions are also the people who throw tokens of them — like flags and bald eagles — in the back of their TV ads during re-elections.

The terror is out there, you’re afraid, and the government has now enlarged its capacity to keep you terrified — and maybe protect you, if focus groups suggest that your death would create no sympathy for the government in power.

The worst thing about this kind of terrorism is that it will leave us with a multi-trillion dollar program to protect all the nothing that is left. Without rights and dignity, Americans aren’t Americans anymore.

But at least the homeland will be secure from those who question our government’s right to terrorize us.

Tim Kearns

is a senior in political science from Bellevue, Neb.