The issue at hand.

PEOPLE MENTION THE THOUGHT around the water cooler. Pundits convey the idea in scattered editorials. But it all seems to remain in the category of loose talk and offhand opinion, becoming a sort of accepted common understanding, easily securing nods of agreement and just as readily dismissed, ignored, or forgotten. And that's why this widespread view doesn't have any effect, doesn't make any difference, doesn't actually change anything.

So it's time to take seriously what we already know. We need to start saying it out loud. Today's terrorism scare is a moral panic--just like the 1950s fear of "creeping communism;' the 1960s reaction against rock and roll, the 1970s belief that cultists were spiriting away our children, the 1980s anxiety that no child was safe in a daycare center, and the 1990s fear that violent video games were inaugurating a youth crime epidemic.

The case needs to be laid out. The facts need to be nailed down in a way that will finally make us say, seriously, "That's right, we really have been used and manipulated. We really have been sold a bill of goods. We really have been fed fear all out of proportion to the actual danger. And it's time to reverse this superstitious dread!"

This is why Jeffrey S. Victor's cover story, "Why the Terrorism Scare is a Moral Panic," is so important. It isn't that he's the first to say it. It's that we need to fully internalize the truth of it.

One way to do this is to seek perspective--to imagine ourselves and our children in the future, looking back, laughing at some television documentary about our time and reminiscing: "Remember when you couldn't even go to a museum without having your purse or backpack checked?" or exclaiming, "I can't believe they actually confiscated nail clippers at airports!" Today's toddlers, tomorrow's teenagers, will declare, "What a riot--they had highway signs and subway announcements urging people to 'report any suspicious activity.'"

Seen this way, there isn't that much distance between Cold War fears of "a Red under every bed" and today's obsession with terror threat levels.

Looking at this issue from a Humanist perspective, we can see how today's government-sponsored fear mongering is long overdue for a thorough debunking. After all, the skepticism that forms a basic part of the Humanist outlook isn't to be applied only to religion and paranormal claims; it has a political role to play, too. It should be brought to bear as an antidote to the superstitions and panics fostered by an administration that doesn't respect its citizens.

Eternal vigilance to these moral panics isn't the price only of liberty; it's the price of rationality and national sanity. We need to be constantly awake to the cons and scams that pass as federal security analyses and news reports. After all, these ideas are soon codified into law and common practice. Then we get used to them. Finally, we start to imagine it has always been this way and that living under surveillance is a necessary element of civilization and a natural part of modern life.

How serious is this? Overwhelmingly so, as Douglas Mattern shows in "The Five Minutes that Saved the World." The Cold War could have become nuclear Armageddon on September 26, 1983, had it not been for the presence of mind of one courageous Soviet officer. Just as Humanists have long known, reason and compassion offer the only salvation from moral panic.