Shortly before my lecture begins, I can hear my students bickering amongst themselves as to whether they believe Governor Ige’s offer for our state to accept Syrian refugees is admirable or irresponsible.

“Could the War on Terror,” I ask them, “be considered a moral panic, a perceived evil threatening our society? Does it elicit an unwarranted response?”

Given the recent attacks in Paris, these seems like appropriate questions for a rhetoric and composition course, a field of writing that teaches students to make arguments and then corroborate them with carefully researched evidence.  Such questions, I’ve found, usually strike heated and dynamic debates.  

Today’s college students are hardwired to social media apps; their daily lives consist of unprecedented exposure to news feeds that can choke logic with a litany of hyperbolic reportage. The difficulty in navigating this labyrinth of sensationalism creates a complicated learning environment, as it often leads to opinions that are as passionate and determined as they are partisan and misguided.

For example, I once had a student attempt to fact check me during a lecture on climate change and then interrupt me with his rebuttal, a counter-narrative informed by data he hastily gathered from Infowars. com.  While such incidents create powerful teachable moments, they also suggest that critical reasoning—the ability to gather, evaluate and apply evidence—has become a challenging skill to foster in the development of 21st century learners. The approaching semester’s end, compounded with a revival of our community’s concern for terrorism, presents an interesting opportunity to assess how well they’ve learned this skill.

“For next class, I want you to find the evidence,” I tell my students, interrupting a class-splitting discussion that has evolved into whether or not Waikiki is a major target for ISIS. “Is the War on Terror a moral panic?”

“Is the War on Terror a moral panic?”

The most difficult part in answering such questions is refusing to let our personal experiences rule the conversation.

A part of me is naturally tempted to tell my students that I was in their shoes in 2001, sitting in a college composition lecture when another professor entered the classroom and informed us that an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Having grown up a mere 45 minutes outside of Manhattan, I want to tell them about a man I knew and admired who was killed in that attack, and about a close family friend who was fatally wounded by an improvised explosive device in the subsequent invasion of Iraq.

Some of my students are veterans of the War on Terror and neither their classmates nor I will ever come close to understanding the hell they’ve witnessed overseas. While I would never undermine the importance of all these personal experiences, when it comes to critical reasoning, they all must take a backseat to more substantive evidence.

Two days later, my students pile into the classroom pulling out laptops and papers, each of them prepared to answer the questions I’ve put forth. My protocol for such discussions involves the students independently researching sources to substantiate their claims, followed by our class discussing the potential bias within each source they cite.  

“So what did we find?”

“I actually had trouble,” one of them speaks up, “finding an exact number of casualties.  Shouldn’t we at least have a body count?”

“I would think so,” I respond. This seems like a logical question. But it’s a difficult one to answer, and so I turn it over to the class. “Could anybody find research about this? How many people have died in this war?”

More than one student refers to a report they found titled, “Body Count: Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the War on Terror.” It’s a 2015 joint study by Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. The three groups of accomplished doctors set out to measure the human costs of the U.S.-led War on Terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

“Certainly there must be some bias in this report,” I challenge them.

“One of those groups won a Nobel Peace Prize,” a student explains. “I would say that qualifies as a reputable source.”

“Good!” I think to myself, “they’re learning something!”  

Unfortunately, my excitement is overshadowed by our discussion about the findings. According to this report, a conservative estimate for the enemies and civilians killed by violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan is 1.3 million, possibly reaching over 2 million. Keep in mind that this number reflects violent deaths, not those civilians killed as a result of the war, whether from U.S.-backed sanctions, damage to critical infrastructure, or limited access to essential government services.

A conservative estimate for the enemies and civilians killed by violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan is 1.3 million, possibly reaching over 2 million.

While approximations seem problematic and inhumane when we’re counting human lives, it’s important to underscore that the entire report is not based on guesswork alone. On the contrary, the study notes that there were exactly 4,804 coalition deaths in Iraq and 3,485 in Afghanistan. I explain to my class that in regard to precisely how many enemies we’ve killed, Lt. Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, once infamously said in a press conference that,  “We don’t do body counts.”

Nonetheless, the numbers that are available indicate that the United States has lost less than 10,000 thousand civilians and military in the War on Terror, while our enemies have lost somewhere between 1.3 and 2 million conservatively. The truth is that if we’re measuring this war’s success by human lives then we’re winning disproportionately and arguably exhaustingly so.

“But doesn’t terrorism remain a real threat?” I ask the class. “Shouldn’t we fear another attack?”

“I found one report,” a student explains, “that says you’re more likely to slip and die in the shower than be killed by a terrorist. Where is the war on slippery shower floors?” The classroom fills with laughter, allowing for a lighthearted moment in an otherwise sobering conversation.

“So is the War on Terror a moral panic?” I ask. Heads nod in unison.

Although this discussion is taking place in a small community college classroom in Hawaii, it is no doubt part of a national conversation that should involve more critical reasoning and less inflammatory rhetoric. The takeaway from this exercise is that in a world where we’ve all become accustomed to following a biased, tailor-made news feed, critical reasoning asks us to take a step back, conduct some objective research and reassess the realities of our convictions.  Should some of Hawaii’s community college freshmen be able to learn and practice this skill so eloquently, then I like to believe more of our politicians can do so as well.

There will always be people who are terrorized by some of our mainstream media outlets’ portrayal of this war, afraid that it will only take one Syrian refugee to cause another major terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Critical reasoning, however, suggests that these same people should be deathly afraid of their shower floors.