“Could Better Security Have Stopped the New Orleans Terror Attack?” asks The New York Times with furrowed brow. Yes, if you turn the country into a gigantic fortress, you can probably stave off another a “terror attack.” But then, you can achieve even greater assurance of safety against “terror attacks” if you take a cyanide tablet right now and sleep off the fear. How’s that for a remedy?

Anything, anything to abdicate responsibility for what the United States has by its own actions done to invite terror and death into its midst. An entire genocidal, sociopathic country in a state of willful self-delusion, racking its brains to figure out where all that “hate” for it is coming from. Two weeks ago, half of these violence-intoxicated people wanted to kill insurance executives at will. Now they wonder why anyone wants to kill them that way. Really such a mystery?

When a man thinks any stick will do, as Chesterton put it, he’ll pick up a boomerang. Every war we fight, and every proxy we arm, is such a stick and such a boomerang. The harder we throw it, the harder it comes back at us. At a certain point you realize that the only thing that’ll stop the dynamic is for the boomerang to hit its target. It’s not as though the thrower can be persuaded to put the stick down: you can’t persuade people who won’t listen. So maybe the boomerang should be permitted to have its say. It speaks softly, but always with an edge. Its message isn’t exactly pleasant, and never delivered with tact. But misadventure seems to be the only way to drive the relevant point home. And eventually, something has to.