Immediately following the terrorist attacks of Sept.11, 2001, my high school hired more police officers, more security and more limitations of movement within the student body. More or less, my school ended up like a prison.

Besides wondering how Sept. 11 should have had any influence on a small random high school located in south Minneapolis that no terrorist would have even heard of, I wondered how much of the event was exploited to fulfill what the school’s administration originally desired. I wondered how much was done to merely appease paranoid communal minds while fully understanding that all of the work and expenses paid were going to complete waste.

It wasn’t just my school that dramatically changed, of course. The entire nation experienced a dramatic metamorphosis. The most obvious and significant change took place within the airports.

Before coming to UMass, I spent a year working in Israel. If there was one thing I learned while living there, it’s this; if terrorists want to kill people, they will do it, and nothing can stop them unless a society’s entire infrastructure is changed.

In Israel, coping with terrorism is a part of life. There are bag and coat checks outside every club, bar, station, school, restaurant and museum. Soldiers are present in all areas, with a minimum of one on each bus. Yet even with all of the precautions undertaken, Israel’s system has still failed to completely halt terrorist attacks.

I remember a caf’eacute; that got blown up only shortly after my being there. At the door was a standard security guard who checked every person and bag that came to the entrance. Soldiers patrolled all over the populated area. Yet all of this could not stop what happened from occurring.

Working in London over the summer compounded what I learned about this. One night, after I visited a club called “Tiger Tiger” in London’s Piccadilly Circus, there was an attempted bombing on the building, as well as the areas around it, with the intention of killing as many civilians as possible.

Although England has suffered numerous terrorist attacks in the past, it has nevertheless refrained from taking the strongest measures possible in preventing them. This is mostly because the attacks are relatively rare, and preservation of civilian freedom and an ageless way of life was the priority.

Only a few weeks after the attempted attack, the Tour de France began in Hyde Park. When I came to watch, I was surprised to discover that although there were perhaps hundreds of thousands of people crammed into a very dense space, my backpack was not checked by the security regulating the entering lines.

The danger of the complete lack of security became all the more obvious to me when I threw my backpack next to an old couple to save the spot and walked away for a minute. Before it hit me that maybe I should not have done that, the couple was already scared sh*tless.

I later asked a British buddy of mine about the absence of security at the Tour De France, and how I thought it made no sense. He responded that there is no way to prevent a terrorist attack from happening if a killer has a will. The measures England or any other country have taken in preventing attacks are to merely give the public a peace of mind, to prove that something was being done to prevent terrorism from happening.

The reality is that given the enormous amount of terrain terrorists have to attack, there would be no way to prevent such events from unfolding. This man was right. Only a few days later, a terrorist in Scotland incompetently attempted an attack which backfired, resulting in his becoming a permanent burn victim. London had been on lock down only a few days before from the attempted Tiger Tiger bombing, and yet with all of the security, there was still a way.

So the question is; is terrorism actually preventable? I’m not usually a cynic, but this time, at least in the long run, my answer is, “No.” The world needs to start looking at the big picture; yes, security measures will minimize attacks, but is sacrificing our liberties and our ways of life worth it?

Isn’t the whole reason we’re combating it in order to preserve these very freedoms? A killer who wants to kill and who is not afraid of dying will do so, and if he’s not completely incompetent, he will do it.

Some may consider this simple truth to be defeatist; it isn’t. In reality, this truth is the complete opposite. By reducing pointless restrictions inhibiting our freedoms, we can instead focus our energies on other problems that kill American citizens in levels that far exceed that of terrorism; poverty and a poor health care for example.

If the point of counterterrorism is to save innocent lives, then why not start tackling the problems that are not only of far greater danger to us, but problems which are far simpler to stop?

Joe Hughes is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].