During the Cold War, the United States outspent the Soviet Union prior to its collapse but the story could have been different. In fact, this could be the tactic of Osama bin Laden and his followers. Americans are already running scared, some are even afraid of their own shadow, and as long as there is a perception of a threat, this country will continue to spend more and more money on skirmishes such as the one in Iraq or on Homeland Security with more and more expensive but not quite effective devices in an attempt to secure the borders. This action, carried on long enough, will have the effect of draining the resources of this country to the point where we can no longer do anything else. Our economy is turning into a Third World economy already and as long as we continue to spend so heavily on homeland security, there will come a time when we can spend on nothing else. The nation's infrastructure is already falling apart. What next!

I suppose we could consider some very real dangers at home and abroad, even in such bastions of tolerance such as the Netherlands. At the very least these sort of things get very depressing.