“You take a risk getting up in the morning, crossing the street or sticking your face in a fan.” It may be a quote from “The Naked Gun,” but it is true nevertheless.

I think it is especially important to remember in the wake of the recent school violence hysteria.

In the last three weeks since the Columbine shootings, Ames High School has received nine violent threats and been evacuated three times.

Ames High is not alone. There has been a rash of threats across the state and the nation. Most every school district in the country has or is being forced to reassure parents it is taking appropriate steps in the interest of school safety.

All this for a few — well, several empty threats. Still, I can understand the concerns of parents and educators. No one wants to be the one who let something slide that turned into a massacre.

But this fear, this hysteria that is gripping the country is exactly what terrorism is all about. Most of this school violence amounts to juvenile terrorism.

A terrorist is someone who wants to draw attention to a cause or an idea. They employ violence or even just the threat of violence to gain themselves some leverage.

Terror is a potent weapon. While most fringe revolutionaries don’t have the ability to inflict large scale casualties, they do have the ability to inflict large scale fear. Especially in this day and age, when the news media is always looking for something shocking.

Some people may not think of these disillusioned high schoolers as terrorists. When we hear terrorist, most of us immediately think of some radical political group like the IRA.

But these kids, just like any terrorists, have a message they want to get out. They’re not seeking liberation for themselves or their homeland; they’re merely seeking attention.

That’s certainly the message I get from all these bomb threats. Before Columbine and the other incidents, no one put much care in the goings-on of high schoolers.

Now, every night you turn on your TV you can see some kid being interviewed about what he thinks about being evacuated from classes. The parents and administrators don’t know what to make of kids killing kids, so they’re asking other kids.

I find that the saddest part of the whole situation. That it takes a state of near anarchy for these kids to be able to get the attention they obviously feel they need.

Kids aren’t stupid; they know what works. Right now, if you want attention, bomb threats seem to be the way to go.

It is the duty of the parents, teachers, and administrators to deal with these threats the way all terrorism should be dealt with. No one should have his life governed by threats, and to that end, no one should be canceling school for an unsubstantiated bomb threat.

Everyone wants to feel safe, but we can’t be , not all the time. There is a huge difference between feeling safe and being safe.

For all our security precautions, from stop signs to metal detectors, are we really all that safe? I don’t think so. In fact, most attempts to achieve safety are laughable.

Every school with a graduating class of more that 12 now has metal detectors, security guards, sniper towers, and mandatory body cavity searches. Yet any Tom, Dick or Harry can walk into the mall, or the library with a bomb, three machine guns and a brick of bottle rockets.

What’s even more ridiculous is that we expend so much worry over some incredibly outrageous possibilities. Don’t be fooled by the media hype. Your chances of being killed in a high school are next to none.

But I’d wager that a number of the parents who are the most worked up about school violence left their last “emergency town meeting” and didn’t put their seat-belt on.

We pick and choose what we’re afraid of in this country, and it really doesn’t make any sense. How many people smoke, but don’t eat red meat? How many people don’t smoke, but like to lie out in the sun? It’s all going to kill us sooner or later.

We can’t keep our babies safe forever, no matter how hard we try. Any one of us could be hit by a car, or a train, or cancer, or heart disease, or any of a million other things today. Once we accept the real possibility that we will die, we must start looking at how we live.

If you cringe and run any time there is a threat to your life, you are merely a pawn of your own fears. Giving up control of your life to terrorists and dying are nearly the same thing.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to be safe. Stopping at stop signs and going to the basement during a tornado are generally good ideas. But it should take more than just an anonymous phone call to make several hundred people scatter like ants.

Columbine was a tragedy. The larger tragedy is how America has been willing to alter their lives around the prank calls of a few attention-hungry kids.

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Ben Godar is a junior in sociology from Ames. He is the A&E editor of the Daily.