OPINION

New grim reality for all city-dwellers

British press reports of «life returning to normal» in London are certainly a journalistic cliche. But they can hardly be conssidered accurate, unless one’s understanding of «normal life» includes citizens walking the streets with the constant fear that a bomb may go off at any moment, avoiding all forms of public transport – which have become a favored target for prospective terrorists – and stoically putting up with heightened security inspections, justified as necessary preventative measures…. This widespread sense of fear is entirely justified when terrorist attacks become a daily reality rather than a theoretical risk. This is the reality that the citizens of New York, Bali, Madrid, Kenya, Istanbul and now London, have to live with. The fact that entire societies are completely vulnerable to the whims of terrorists has consolidated public fear to such an extent that citizens have virtually forgotten their individual freedoms and have silently accepted the imposition of strict security measures by the state as well as stop-and-search procedures that they would have previously regarded as a violation of their personal freedoms… And the more widespread these attacks become, the more such freedoms will continue to be compromised by an increasingly fearful public…

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