There’s nobody looking for the big truck, anymore.
It’s hard to calibrate evil in the world today, so much bad is happening. But please note the big bomb blast in Somalia over the weekend. This headlines a new era of discord and danger. America’s unraveling is playing a big part.
Perhaps 300 people will ultimately die from this terror blast. Even in the most troubled, violent parts of the world, moving a bomb capable of that amount of destruction into the place it blew up in Mogadischu was unheard of until this weekend.
Everywhere in the world individual acts of terror no longer provoke surprise – they’re considered normal, whether it’s a lone shooter in Las Vegas or a Taliban suicide bomber in Erbil and literally hundreds of versions in between.
USAToday reported extensively on 58 major terrorist incidents from September, 2014 – December, 2016. More than 200 stories were filed on what averaged more than two incidents per month.
We just can’t absorb all that. We don’t want to, either. Only two story lines about terrorism seem still to grab people’s attention: when they’re reminded that their attention is waning and when told that the incidence of terror is increasing.
But in all these many, increasing, horrible stories what gets lost is that the extent of death and destruction of each individual terrorist incident has been declining.
Home-grown, usually lone maverick terrorism is moving in the other direction with the Vegas gunman.
But death and destruction per incident by overtly political groups has been slowly and painstakingly reduced even as the incidence of them has increased.
Why? Well it should be pretty obvious. We’re learning how to prevent them. More and more nations are exchanging police files, surveillance technology is expanding and improving, so it’s harder and harder for the terrorist – even the suicide terrorist – to get his job done.
Until now.
The destruction in Mogadischu required a massive amount of explosives. They’ve found what’s left of the truck that carried it. It was not a vegetable truck. It was a very special truck with special tires and special suspensions, a composite truck actually with an unusual trailer and very unusual black tinted windows that US drones or French peace-keepers if not Somali police would have intercepted long before it wiggled its way down streets designed for zucchini deliveries.
So how’d it get through?
Someone took their eye off the drone. Or not even police were around because the U.S. has stopped funding them. Or not even French peacekeepers were manning the checkposts because Macron has also pulled them back to save money.
It’s not just America that’s unraveling. The right is pushing its nasty face up again in Europe. One common theme with all of these political convergences is a drastic new inwardness, a laagering mentality where you build walls around yourself and don’t give a damn what happens outside.
Multiple subverses of this result in shrinking participation on the international stage and reduction of overall government everywhere.
There’s nobody looking for the big truck, anymore.
Death and destruction is going to increase. It could increase exponentially with a nuke of North Korea and it could increase linearly with more big trucks getting into city centers.
It means the fabric that kept peace in the world is coming apart, much less peace in each society. To me it’s terrifying.