Gene Healy: Terrorism isn't an 'existential threat'

My father, a public high school teacher in New Jersey for three decades, used to get really annoyed by Earth Day, a religious holiday that somehow gets an exemption from the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

A born contrarian, Dad always used the occasion to give his students hard data showing that the sky isn’t falling and that we’re not all going to die. One Earth Day a couple of years before he retired, he was spreading the good news when a high school junior raised her hand to ask, “Mr. Healy, why are you so negative?”