ALL people live with certain dangers, risks and threats around them. But each individual and each society finds their own individual and collective ways of organizing and ranking them. Everything from personal experience, cultural representations, ideological lens, or accumulation of resources comes into play in helping us understand the things that we should be afraid of and the things we don’t “really” need to be afraid of.

It is a very human endeavor, primarily because it generally doesn’t make sense. One of the ways we mark our territory in this world and define our own existence is by accepting obvious fictions instead of a truth and laughing while we sign our own death warrants. Such is the lesson of the Garden of Eden and the choice of Adam and Eve. What makes human beings human is their ability to act in aggressive, passionate and unthinking ways that might actually be bad for them.

A poor person can feel it is more important to vote for someone who has the right “values” instead of someone whose economic policies might help the impoverished. Women can feel that governments should be in charge of their bodies. An island like Guam can feel more comfortable as a colony than as a sovereign entity.

There is something to our complexity that we can convince ourselves of almost anything and make things that should be unthinkable possible and even normal. We can organize the threats and risks in our lives and justify what we see as being important or worth addressing. More people have died from domestic gun violence than international terrorism in the U.S., but which is the issue that can unite people across parties and which is the one where the government always becomes hopelessly deadlocked? We accept certain things as endangering us because of various ideological, cultural, economic and political contexts. If the government says something is a threat, there are patriotic pulls that insist that as a certain type of citizen you must claim to be afraid or wary of them.

For some people these threats are to be articulated in a counter-critical manner. We draw our identity and collectivity by being from a group of people who have identified the “real” threats, the ones everyone else won’t admit to. Ultimately, we speak volumes of ourselves by the things we claim to be afraid of, or the things we articulate as threats to our existence.

In terms of people misunderstanding their existence, North Korea and its potential threat to Guam is a perfect example. The North Korean government is oppressive but this alone doesn’t make it a “threat.” The U.S. has a long colorful history of supporting far more brutal regimes, and continues to support several governments that are far more involved in supporting active international terrorism. In truth, North Korea is an impoverished, starving nation that is a threat primarily to its own people. But when someone is marked as an “enemy,” most feel no impulse to understand them; the designation already gives you everything you need to know about them. They are bad. They are evil. They are a threat.

The eager support that the United States provides South Korea in both economic and military terms threatens North Korea and marginalizes it. North Korea does not have the ability to do any real damage to the United States and doing so would not be in its own best interests. North Korea does not have the ability to do much of anything except threaten. It could engage in suicidal strikes, but while there is plenty of rhetoric that North Korea can hit certain targets, there is little evidence that it would actually want to.

For all the fear that people have been feeling lately about North Korea making certain threats, it is important to remember that this type of rhetoric is common amongst countries, with the United States the most aggressive abuser. The United States constantly makes statements about whom it can hit and how it can hit targets. When compared to North Korea however the U.S. has shown a greater likelihood to actually attack those that it mentions it is capable of attacking.

A great uproar has been made over North Korea having nuclear weapons and obtaining nuclear weapons. This is understandable since the world should be actively working to reduce the amount of nuclear weapons that exist. But if you are looking for nuclear threats why are you worried about North Korea? The United States has close to 10,000 nuclear weapons around the world today. Each of those nuclear weapons represents hundreds of thousand possible deaths. Each represents the potential end of humankind and if any accidents take place, a domestic catastrophe. If you are truly looking for threats from nuclear weapons, people in the U.S. and attached to it (like Guam) should also look inward and self-reflect. Don’t look at North Korea for them, you can already find them in your backyard.