This week’s been a game-changer in the fight against terrorism.

The five men arrested for plotting to blow up a bridge over the Cuyahoga River in Ohio were not Arab, Sikh, Indian or Muslim. They were white, American-born and raised, self-declared anarchists, no doubt pumped by the world-wide protests going on against government corruption and ineptitude and the elitist war against the common people. Ostensibly begun with the Arab Spring, this global intifada has been brewing for many years, coming to a head with the economic collapse sparked in America by the subprime mortgage crisis, rampant corruption of Corporate America and out-of-control spending by the Military Industrial Complex. 

Then came the news that suicide bombers can now have non-metal IEDs surgically implanted in their bodies in such a way that they escape detection by our most sophisticated devices. 

While Europe has banned body scanners and branded them as ineffective health risks, and a former head of the TSA, Kip Hawley, called the organization a “national embarrassment,” America’s leaders continue to buffer the ever-expanding surveillance state with billions of dollars. 

Since the latest terror detection technology does all but surgically search our bodies already, there seems little more they can do to see inside us, irrespective of human rights, which don’t matter anymore to those in power.

Ay, there’s the rub. If human rights,  decency and more equitable distribution of wealth and natural resources did matter to those in governmental and corporate power positions, terrorism wouldn’t be a problem in the first place. Satisfied, invested citizens would take security management into their own hands in an effective, acceptable way. The vast majority of Earth’s population would want to maintain their way of life and  would participate in ensuring that happened.

This requires a sea change in the way the world is run and that change should begin in America. We are not going to be able to predict acts of terrorism by ethnic or religious profiling and we are not going to be able to surgically scrutinize everyone who gets on a plane, train or subway or enters a stadium or towering skyscraper. We are going to have to make our world a more just place for all to live so that all contribute to managing it.

This is a lesson world leaders need to learn immediately. The alternative universe is too scary to think about.