Refuse to be terrorized (2006)

The idea isn't to shrug off what you perceive to be dangerous situations. The recent attempts at US attacks were thwarted because people were correctly suspicious. Level of suspicion also depends on where you're at. In your second instance with the coffee shop, if I'm in Vancouver, Canada I'd think "He probably just forgot it, I should go after him." If I'm in London, then yeah, I'd probably be suspicious since from my perspective there seem to be a lot more successful attacks there.

The idea is in how you respond to those sorts of things. Do you really consider the plane scenario a strong possibility for you, with the guy actually carrying a bomb? If you do, that shows two things. One, you're (statistically) over-paranoid and have been "terrorized". Two, you've basically admitted that you think all the current security measures designed to make you feel safer are basically crap, in which case you should agree with removing them and potentially designing better methods that actually work.

Yes. He's most likely just scared of flying. The remote chance of him being a terrorist is nicely balanced by the zero chance of anyone hijacking a plane these days without being piled on by angry passengers.

So last year this kind-of happened to me.

Except I was flying home from Bali with my boyfriend. (I'm a guy). And the person next to us in our row of three was a tiny, Italian, catholic nun, who spoke absolutely no English whatsoever and prayed A LOT during the entire flight, and was not pleased at all to be seated next to us. Oh, and we were flying Qatari Airways, so all messages from the captain were in Arabic, and only sometimes English. And the majority of the passengers were muslims. And the loudest group on board were a bunch of Chinese christians from Singapore. They also prayed a lot for a safe flight.

I would assume the mainstream paranoid American attitude would have set off hundreds of alarm bells in that situation, but what do you know, everything worked out fine. I mostly slept during that flight.

You really should do the math on risks instead of acting irrationally and afraid. The risk of dying in a terrorist attack is way less than being struck by lightning, and way, WAY less than being killed in a car accident. If you take the car every day, and still avoid people leaving bags behind, you're not doing the math right, you're acting irrationally. You're modifying your behaviour to avoid the 1:10000000 risk, but don't do anything about the 1:10000 risk. It should be the other way around.

Many things are real. Lightning strikes. Car accidents. Meteorites to the head. Tsunamis. Smoking. Fat.

Dying because of a terrorist attack is way, way, way, way down on the list of stuff you are likely to die from, so the only rational thing to do is to worry about the stuff ABOVE it on the list. Like driving. Or eating right. Or not smoking. Get your priorities right.