It is sad to hear that the man who ran away from police and ended up being shot and killed in London did not have a bomb on him (or, if you are the Tube that day, a good thing). Although I've yet to see anyone play the race card on London police, rest assured someone will. Which leads into my main point. The war on Terror, the war in Iraq, these are not total wars for the West. Because of this, many people mistakenly think that society is business as usual. It isn't. If you joke around about bombing something, you are probable going to face a rough arrest. If you are the subject of a terror investigation, and police try to stop you, you best stop. And if you run, you had best not run to the place where acts of terrorism have been occurring, because you are going to face worse things than a rough arrest.
Subjects of official investigations are not the only ones to blame. We have not been in total war since World War II, and society has forgotten that times of war require a different decorum than peace times. Every loud mouth politician or opponent of our current wars, people who plan their rhetoric around the sad deaths of soldiers, may end up through their very words costing more soldiers lives, or even the lives of hundreds or thousands of citizens on the homefront. I don't know if it is because we are that ignorant, or if because of political correctness the government refuses to give us reminders that things like "Loose Lips Sink Ships," or if we are just that arrogant. All I do know is that after 60 plus years of small wars, we seem to have forgotten that wartime is a very different thing from peace time.
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