Terrorism Spreads Like a Disease

          Originally written 16 December 2015:  Like everyone else, I’ve thought a lot lately about terrorism and the reasons behind it.  Terrorism seems to stem from frustration, anger, and hatred, and/or mental disability.  Ignorance, misinformation, greed, and power hungry villains are its enablers.   Violence, pain, fear, and suffering are its results. 

          People get frustrated and angry when economic conditions and educational opportunities are so unequal that others live in luxury while they themselves can’t even get a job to feed their families.  They learn to hate when others hold their hardships and situation over their head and deny them the opportunity to advance themselves.  Many such victims turn to terrorism in their feelings of hopelessness and frustration.  And, of course, there are always the mentally disabled, those who are disconnected from reality, the ones who hurt in ways unimaginable to most of us, and who want others to notice them and feel the same kind of pain that they do.  Some such mentally disabled people want an out, any kind of out, from the world in which they find themselves, and many don't mind taking many others with them when they go.  Such people make perfect terrorists.              
          Pseudo religious leaders who teach and lead a perverted form of religion rather than spirituality,  power hungry tyrants who will do and say anything to claw their way to the top of the heap, and the greedy, self appointed aristocrats who want the riches of others because they think their money gives them control and makes them better than others, are the ones who enable the conditions, frustrations, and insanities that lead to terrorism.  They use others to practice terrorism and self destruction while they themselves sit back and reap the results.
          I've noticed that frustration, anger, and hatred, whether expressed through terrorism or other means, are spread very similarly to a communicable disease.  Whomever these things touch, they infect.  Anger, hate, fear, and violence beget anger, hate, fear, and violence.  That is the way diseases operate too.  They are communicable.  They spread to others, through their victims and the ones in contact with their victims, and then reproduce.  
          Think about it.  Terrorists attack other people like a lethal disease attacks the body (think Ebola, for example).  Their victims either then die, or they survive with injuries and psychological damage from which they may or may not ever recover.  Such damage can be irrational fear, hatred of the attacker, and an uncontrollable desire to strike back at the thing that hurt them.  The same feelings can also infect the victims' family members, friends, and group members.  These victims and secondary victims then take on the same anger, hatred, fear, and desire for violence that the original terrorists displayed, and redirect it toward those that they feel has attacked them.  Thus, the disease (terrorism) spreads back and forth, from victim to victim, from crowd to crowd, and nation to nation.  Eventually, when the disease has reached enough people and has done enough damage, it becomes an epidemic that affects everyone in one way or another.  
         Since terrorism is like a disease, then applying the principles for the control of communicable diseases should be useful.  In controlling an infectious disease, we identify the source, find the method of transmission, isolate those infected, develop and apply treatments, prevent further transmission, and destroy the cause if possible.  We are already employing many of these ideas in our fight against terrorism, some of which are working, and some of which are not.  I am not going to explore those things now.  They are for discussion at another time.  After all, I'm just writing a blog post, not a book.