LETTER: On terrorism and the coronavirus

I’m having second thoughts about our response to 9/11. After the attack, which killed 3,000-plus people, we made enormous changes to our security methods and spent trillions of dollars on a needless war. This appears to have been an enormous overreaction to the attack by terrorists.

We have now been attacked by a virus, killing 170,000 Americans, and some people don’t even want to wear a mask. Members of our current administration didn’t even want to recognize the reality of said pandemic. They don’t want to help those in need and President Donald Trump thinks it will magically disappear. This is akin to watching the Twin Towers falling down and the government saying this isn’t happening and the structures will rebuild themselves. Just stay where you are, all is well. It’s just a bad dream.

The Trump administration appears to be taking this pandemic in stride. The economy is being smothered by it, people are dying at a rate of one every 80 seconds from it and they’re on recess. Sad thing is, it’s possible that the worst is yet to come.

We could have saved a lot of money, had we reacted to 9/11 by rendering a response based on the number of deaths.

I’m amazed how easily we can spend trillions of dollars to go to war and create an entirely new security network in response to 3,000 lives lost to terrorists. And yet we are so inept at our response to 170,000 deaths by a pandemic. Our priorities are all for war, little for health and welfare.