If you watched the news in the days leading up to Independence Day 2015, you are well aware, I’m sure, that ISIS was most certainly targeting every city in the USA and set to destroy all Americans on July 4. Probably because, as you know, ISIS hates our liberty. Our fireworks would have been useless against them.

Yet somehow, July 4 has come and gone, and as far as I can tell, ISIS did nothing. As in, absolutely nothing at all. What happened? Oddly enough, this isn’t the first time the media has latched on to nebulous FBI warnings about possible terrorist attacks:

Journalist Adam Johnson went back a decade and found 40 other times the FBI and Homeland Security have issued similar threats around national holidays or major events, none of which actually was followed by a terrorist attack. It’s more than a little disturbing how much CNN and others have seemingly grown to rely on these nebulous warnings to keep viewers hooked. As Johnson quipped on Twitter earlier this week, “Can the FBI break its terror-predicting 0-40 losing streak this weekend? Tune into CNN to find out!”

All of this doesn’t mean that a terrorist attack on US won’t eventually happen. Simple math tells us that, no matter the precautions taken or the civil liberties taken away, one may get through. But it is a rare event, and one which human beings have lived with throughout our history. By magnifying it and terrifying everyone, we’re only doing the terrorists’ job for them.

Exactly. What is the point of terrorism? To incite terror. If we are terrorized even when they do nothing, it seems we’ve made their jobs excessively easy, not to mention cheap. ISIS was indirectly able to submerge nearly the entire news-watching public into a veritable sea of churning terror for exactly zero dollars and zero point zero cents.

What’s the solution to this? Turn off the news. Go outside. Invite your neighbors over for dinner. If there really is a threat to the US, I promise you’ll find out about it eventually.