There are obstacles in the way to success – one is money, the solvent that translates all social values into dollars and cents – but with moxie and determination, barring some catastrophic personal event, we can, and often do accomplish whatever form of success we set out to attain.

Not every country in the world can boast such healthy hubris.

We admire and praise those among us who are heroic when the opportunity to show this character trait presents itself – not an everyday occurrence.

For a few years now we have been threatened by increased fear, however – curiously enough following the cold war, a period of about 50 years during which even the least enlightened among us was aware that a confrontation with the evil empire of communism might mean the rapid extinction of our civilization following an exchange of nuclear missiles between us and the Soviet Union. What more deadly and frightening form of terrorism than the prospect of all-out nuclear war? A couple of times – during the Cuban Missile Crisis and during the Korean War – we came close to unleashing that form of nuclear terror and having it unleashed upon us.

But during those fifty frankly horrible years, we as a society didn’t go around skulking from shelter to shelter nor did we live in an atmosphere of constant dread that would hamper us from going about our daily business with relative abandon.

Soon after the official end to the cold war – something we owe in large part to the actions of a Russian and an American, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan – soon after the monumental event which brought about the collapse of the Soviet regime, we began in this country to talk about "weapons of mass destruction." This phrase became a cliché used for political purposes in order to define the threat that rogue states posed on the good people of the world through attempts by the evil leaders of these pariah nations to develop nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and biological weapons, maybe even rabid dogs let loose in our urban centers.

Associated with the clandestine and reprehensible efforts by these bad leaders to manufacture and stockpile such weapons, came the suspicion that similar abhorrent tools of war would be acquired by terrorists trying to sneak some or all of those devices into our country.

Slowly our optimism became frayed and a cloud of fear began to hang over all Americans as we heard over and over again different people in government invoke the increasing threat of horrible weapons.