I don’t know where we’re going with this essay, but ever since the beer truck in Stockholm mowed down a group of people on the main street, steered apparently by a refugee Uzbek nutcase, uneasy questions have been ricocheting around in my head, and I can’t seem to find satisfactory answers. I got the news with my morning coffee, and I filed it away with the stories about the Nice Promenade des Anglais and the London bus and the Paris nightclub and the Saint Petersburg subway — things that happen that I would be glad if they hadn’t, but that I can’t do anything about.

Then I got a message on my phone from my son in Philadelphia : “Everyone’s all right.”

As it happens we have relatives and friends in Stockholm and my son had taken it upon himself to check and let me know that all of them were okay. I found that thoughtful, and would have let it go at that, but then I began wondering why my son had been concerned enough to check. It had never occurred to him to be similarly concerned about acquaintances in London or Paris — or in Oklahoma City. These were all events that took place in the newspapers; not in our personal lives. We didn’t expect them to impinge on us. Even the disaster of the trade towers on 9/11, though it happened where I could see the smoke plume, didn’t prompt me initially think of the possibility of it being fatal to any of my personal acquaintances.

Was this one somehow different? Apparently, at least for my son. But why? Because Stockholm is small, because Sweden itself is small? Because Sweden is notoriously neutral and level-headed, and should therefore logically be immune to crazy upheavals in the rest of the world? Or just because the people my son was checking on were family; not just strangers?

Deaths from terrorist attacks are statistically such a tiny fraction of deaths from other random events — lightning strikes, floods, earthquakes, mudslides, epidemics, incurable diseases — as to hardly figure in our daily worries. (Your chances of being hit by lightning are in the neighborhood of one in a million worldwide; your chances of being killed by a terrorist are somewhere around one in six million, even lower if restricted to murders in the U.S. involving foreign-born perpetrators.) It wouldn’t occur to my son to send me a reassuring message after every Stockholm summer thunderstorm. Why this sudden concern?

I think it somehow has to do with the malicious intent. Lightning strikes and floods are impersonal; the result of chance, not animosity. This makes it futile to expend much effort on thinking about prevention (although a law against building your summer cottage directly on the beach might make sense). So we just shrug (after doing whatever we can to deal with the consequences) and go on with our lives. When it’s a terrorist attack, though, we may fancy that we could perhaps have taken some measures to anticipate it, even prevent it. We don’t look at the odds and wonder whether it would be a better investment to investigate the possibility of reducing the number of lightning strikes, the chances of dying from which are six times as great. That would be called cost-benefit analysis — not a catchy term like “Build a wall!” There is no funding available for such research. There is plenty for combating panic attacks, though. When it comes to terrorists, last year the United States invested 41.2 billion dollars in the Department of Homeland Security, which (considering that there were actually six deaths directly attributable to terrorism in the U.S. during that whole year — the normal rate over the past 10 years) seems like a lot of money to spend on a rather minor threat. By way of comparison, in the whole EU last year there were 134 such deaths, where the population is much larger and the hatreds much stronger. In the U.S. over the past 40 years there has been a yearly average of 74 deaths from mass killings, mostly non-terror-related (and that would of course include 9/11’s 3,000 victims). From a cost-benefit basis the department is an obvious miscalculation.

Our readiness to fund expensive anti-terror measures would therefore seem to be based on irrational fear, with perhaps an admixture of frustration and a desire for vengeance. The fear is statistically unreasonable. The desire for vengeance would seem to be unrealistic, considering that the perpetrators, mostly Muslim, have usually already committed themselves to martyrdom, and would be only too glad to further glorify their successes and priority access to the welcoming virgins in Paradise by having a chance to bloviate against Unbelievers in open court in the West before being executed — by guaranteed humane drugs. Any threat to bomb their surviving families and neighbors back home and raze their houses after the fact doesn’t seem to me to be an effective deterrent, besides being distasteful to us as retaliation on the innocent.

What, then, is the point?

We could certainly find other worthwhile uses for those 40 billions. I would be happy to leave my shoes on and my neighbor’s bag uninspected and just rely on the odds, especially when most of the luggage down there in the baggage hold has been unexamined anyway. A scientific inquiry into the chances of cutting down on the frequency of lightning strikes, or of improving STEM education in the public schools would also meet with my approval, although if given the choice I would be happier about spending it on the schools.

This afternoon a friend suggested another way to look at it. Given the current rate of unemployment among our citizens who have only high school educations, the large number of TSA employees required to make sure we take off our shoes and do not have explosive substances concealed in our toiletries as we board planes (but not trains) is a blessing that reduces the burden on the budget for welfare. He made a similar point about the bloat of our armed forces, which will have to be beefed up to be prepared for possible reactions to the latest round of unplanned tweets from our unpredictable dear leader.

Certainly this whole anti-terrorist campaign might well be looked at again — together with all the other competing budget items that are going to have to be eliminated to balance the budget document now being so bitterly debated by the newly triumphant and gloatingly unified Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. It will not do to pretend that anti-terrorism funding is separate from that for food stamps or health care. It’s all one credit card. But as my friend also pointed out, logic is not one of the talents that distinguishes the present generation of legislators. Still…can we hope?