A Fryday Fillip

I have learnt from bitter experience that there are two things you should not do when drunk, apart from getting drunk in the first place, and those are: visit Trade Me, and send emails. The first is self-evident and the second was in my case, a lesson learnt when I wrote an email to Hell’s Angels in Oakland California criticising the quality of their website. For months, I dreaded the roar of Harley Davidsons coming up my driveway. Of course, none did (yet), but I was tempting fate.

I am doing so again today by imparting something my wife said to me. During the taxing task of boiling a couple of eggs for my breakfast (I am very particular about my eggs) she stated the view that terrorists seem to have been quiet of late. My first thought was that I failed to see the juxtaposition between terrorism and my eggs; my second thought was that for the sake of Peace—Household Peace, not World Peace—I should not reveal my first thought; and my third thought was that she is right—there has been very little in the way of reported terrorism.

The question I pose is why? The ideological divide remains and so too, I imagine, does the fanaticism. So, what has changed? If anything?

Well, in terms of umbrella groups ISIS has its problems and is now fighting for survival, and does Al-Qaeda even exist anymore? So, that may have something to do with it. But there is nothing new there---when was the last large-scale, military-style attack? Most recent attacks have been of the lone-wolf variety, involving at most four or five perpetrators. However, even they have dried up—if we don’t count the all-too-frequent and tragic school killings in the United States.

There are two approaches we could take to answering this question. The first is that the global intelligence community has got on top of terrorism and is effectively shutting it down. That is the positive view. The converse view is that someone somewhere is planning something big. I can’t subscribe to that, though. I don’t know much about global intelligence, but I do know that after the failure to detect and predict 9/11, every intelligence organisation in the world, including New Zealand’s, lifted its game and it is virtually impossible to keep anything secret these days; if something big is being planned, I think we would know about it. I also think that terrorist groups such as ISIS no longer have the resources to mount anything substantial, at least in a conventional sense. Of course, there remains the spectre of a biological attack, a cyberattack and the ever-present threat of nutcase with his finger on the nuclear button. But we have lived with those for years.

So, are we through the worst of it? At the risk of courting fate, I very much hope so. We may be at last looking at a better world. A world where Jacinda delivers her baby, if not much else; where Clarke Gayford gets propositioned by an over-amorous shark (and the Herald reports it as its lead story) Hamilton keeps doing what it does best—trying, and I am left in peace to eat my eggs.

As Satchmo said, it is a wonderful world.

Unless I hear a Harley.