This post's title seems like a silly question. Of COURSE we should treat terrorism exceptionally seriously. Human lives are at stake, to say nothing of the consequences to our economy and our way of life.

But this isn't a silly question. For example, just from America's own relatively recent history, this country is treating the War on Terror far less seriously than World War II. To fight that conflict we mobilized a national draft, imposed rationing on domestic consumption, produced propaganda films released to the American people, converted peacetime factories wholesale to produce armaments, planted victory gardens, and a host of other activities.

Other countries in that same war went much further into the area of "total war" — where every member of the population was mobilized to directly serve the war effort.

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Should the United States go that far in fighting the threat of terrorism? I suspect most people would argue no. But it's a question worth asking.

Or should we ramp down the seriousness? Treat it as a routine law enforcement matter, deal with attacks piecemeal as they arise and generally not concern ourselves with terrorism's threat at all? I suspect most people don't think we should go that far, either.

But focusing on the extremes can be a useful exercise to get a better sense of what it means to be "serious about terror" or "soft on terror." There's all sorts of different components that breaks down to.

For example, there's rhetoric. This shouldn't be dismissed — how leaders talk about terrorism shapes how other people think about it. Should we play up the threat of terrorism to encourage constant vigilance? Or play down the threat of terrorism to avoid giving a few people with bombs the ability to control our lives?

There's also more concrete policy decisions. How tough should it be to get on airplanes? Should everyone be invasively searched by security agents before boarding a plane? Or should we racially profile people and just invasively search people who look racially Arabic? (Of course, the underpants-bomber incident highlights the dangers of relying excessively on racial profiling. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was Nigerian, not Arab. Many Iranians look Caucasian.) Should we use technology to see through passengers' clothing despite the privacy implications?

Many experts I've read argue that the whole rigamrole we go through in airports doesn't actually protect us much — except that it makes ordinary people feel safer and might make someone who actually has something to hide feel nervous and blow his cover. This is derided as "security theater."

Is that worth it? Are there ways we can make airport security better without compromising privacy, or is this a necessary tradeoff?

And if we're willing to do this for air travel, why not train travel? A bomb going off on a crowded big city commuter train could be even more devastating than a blown-up airplane — as attacks in places like Mumbai, Madrid and London have shown. Yet we accept only minimally invasive security procedures for getting on a train or bus but jump through hoops to get on airplanes. Is this a good system to have? Or should we be more vigilant about mass transit, or less vigilant about air travel, or both?

This is a very serious topic with lots of important societal questions. I think it's important that we try to answer them instead of engaging in partisan name-calling and head-hunting.

Further reading: Richard Clarke, "Ten Years Later" — this 2005 article is a thought experiment envisioning a much more intense past decade of terrorism than we actually endured. Clarke, who engaged in a nasty back-and-forth with the Bush administration, takes his whacks at Bush, but even setting those aside he has some interesting concepts.

Jeffrey Goldberg, "The Things He Carried" — an evisceration, cited by Ross Douthat in my above link, of airport security.