It’s a function of the times we’re living in, I think, when Broadway shows could carry on, two Saturday nights ago, despite the botched car bombing in nearby Times Square, which is being described as “a terrorist plot aimed at murdering Americans” by US law enforcement agents.

Flash back to post-September 2001 — the ensuing (and in some ways, understandable) hysteria, paranoia and xenophobia — and you’ll understand the reaction on the Great White Way to be remarkably laissez-faire.

Of course, the suspect, Faisal Shahzad, goofed; no American blood was actually spilled this time, as was the case when the Twin Towers fell. But the over-the-top panic expected from Americans in the wake of such a patent attempt on their way of life was curiously absent. It was as if New Yorkers, their 9/11 trauma now a distant memory, sort of collectively thumbed their noses at the extremist malcontents responsible and said, Eh, fuggedaboudit.

Times have changed.

But is change necessarily a good thing? Certainly, in this age of terror, one ought not to give in to the terrorists’ warped need for vengeance. Signs of a shift in attitudinal maturity in terms of the Americans evolving to become more like the battle-weary Europeans, with their long history of IRA-sponsored terrorist bombings, etc, may be, on the surface, cause for optimism but is it really? Is laxity setting in? Could 9/11 happen again? Fact is, Faisal Shahzad almost got away. As of now, the full facts about the smoking Pathfinder are not known. A picture is emerging however, at least according to the Americans, of a nefarious plot with possible Taliban connections. If this was in fact a terrorist attempt, it was almost risible. Completely inept and half-assed. Kind of like the Christmas Day attempt by Nigerian Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up the Northwest Airplanes plane he boarded. (Is it just me, or are Americans getting lucky with avoiding explosives detonation, in pretty much the same way we Jamaicans always seem fortunate to avoid annual hurricane annihilation?) But it could have easily not have been and Times Square could just as easily have been today reduced to a pile of ash and rubble.

Perhaps the moral of the story is that there truly cannot be a war waged on terrorism.

Or — as in Jamaica’s case — crime, for that matter.

I listened with interest to the Jamaican minister of national security as he addressed the launch of the PNP’s Making Our Communities Safer 2010 project recently. He was taking exception to a cartoon that appeared in a daily, which apparently seemed to pillory his government’s inability to tame the crime monster. (There have been well over 500 murders within the island already this year.) This was against the backdrop of the absolutely mystifying murder of a five-year-old boy as he slept in his bed in Frankfield, Clarendon, which followed close on the heels of another outrageous shooting death, in Glendevon, St James, of a five-year-old girl whose nine-year-old sister and father were also injured in that attack. I got the distinct impression – perhaps I’m mistaken — that the minister was basically saying that the administration was fresh out of ideas (oh, the supreme irony of this at an initiative optimistically titled ‘Making Our Communities Safer’) and suggesting that we the citizenry would have to rid ourselves of that scourge. The minister was visibly shaken at the new low in barbarism to which individuals could sink. So was the Opposition leader, who also condemned the killings.

Apart from these reactions, these particularly gruesome murders have more or less gone by without registering that big of a blip. It’s almost as though we’ve become inured to gore, in pretty much the same way New Yorkers seem to have become to terror threats (where’s George W when you need him?) –another murder on the Rock? Well, what to do?

Don’t misunderstand; I’m not here engaging in self-righteous criticism. For the truth is, what indeed can we do? Except do what we must to keep ourselves as safe as we possibly can. What else is there? Will hand wringing help anything? Even if every civic and religious leader were to issue statements condemning this very dark chapter in our national history, where would it leave us? The next day, we’d all wake up to news that more murders took place even as we slept. Crime is like a bad weed that we have to pull up by the roots, because it just keeps coming back.

There’s a sort of impotence we feel in the light of the stuff around us going to rack and ruin, you know, the sense of the hapless inevitability of it all and the knowledge that we’re tiny, insignificant players. If someone knows categorically the way to get our crime stats down, why not share it with the rest of the class? I suspect it’s not as simple as we’re making it out to be.

Certainly, part of the problem is that terror/crime doesn’t have a distinct face. Am I the only person that looked at Shahzad’s picture and felt that magnetic pull? This is someone I could have seen on the street and of whose boyish good looks I could have thought, Muy caliente. Here in Jamaica, criminality resides at any address: it can be downtown or in Beverly Hills. (Yes, the sale of illegal cigarettes is in fact a crime, white-collar or not.)

But be that as it may. Even if we could finally begin to grapple in some meaningful way with the problem of violent crime in Jamaica, we’d still be vulnerable. After September 11, there have still been numerous terrorist opportunities despite the Americans’ advanced, sophisticated technology, their heightened homeland security measures, their ‘dangerous persons’ database, and whatnot. In the words of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, addressing the fact that Faisal Shahzad almost got away, “Clearly the guy was on the plane and shouldn’t have been. We got lucky.”

And that’s what it all comes down to in the end, the Americans with their terror, us with our crime: dumb luck. Too fatalistic? Maybe. But many of us in Jamaica are indeed lucky. It’s somebody else’s child, somebody else’s loved one who got shot. Until we run out of luck, I guess, and the dead person making the stories on the nightly news is our child, our loved one.

Or worse, us.