So, they had an emergency awareness training for certain people within our county.

The idea is this: millions of federal dollars spent in a rural Texas Panhandle county (population: 23,000) to address possible terror threats. Based on the assumption that we will be a primary target of terrorists.

Believe it or not, folks, every county in the nation has a list of reasons why it "would be a primary terror target". But most of them are wrong.

While a terror attack in the heartland might possibly impact the nation's food supplu, the impact would, in fact, be negligible. The resources needed to impact the millions of acres of farmland in the heartland would be far better spent in major urban areas, where higher human casualty rates are likely. Because we, as Americans, are affected by a loss of life. We're not affected by a loss of resources. And the terrorists know this.

Suppose there were a terror attack in the heartland. Can you imagine a headline decrying the loss of millions of bushels of wheat carrying the same impact as the loss of 3,000 lives? In real life terms, were we affected more by the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11 or by the loss of 3,000 lives? If the former, why does a building's demolition not emotionally crush us.

Despite our extremely materialistic leanings, at our core, and in our hearts, we realize that things can be replaced. People cannot. And so, the heartland will never represent a serious target for foreign terrorists. Domestic terrorists might see it as a target, but let's face it: we like our home pizza delivery far too much for the Tim McVeighs and the Eric Rudolphs of this world to ever pose a substantial threat to this nation's security.

The spending of vast amounts of federal (read: money involuntarily extricated from your pockets and mine) monies on securing the heartland against foreign terrorism is, in fact, pork of the highest magnitude. But it's pork that, sadly, the majority of Americans either don't care about or blindly see as money well spent.