"The problem isn't that we're afraid," Bill Carroll assessed yesterday on his Toronto radio program. "The problem is that we're not afraid enough."

I'm pretty sure Carroll, who writes occasionally for this newspaper, was referring to people like me. But I think I'm in pretty good company.

Walk down the street this past week, and it feels the same as usual. Go for drinks with friends, at crowded bars experiencing no dip in business, and last Friday's arrests of 17 Toronto-area terror suspects hardly dominate conversation. Have dinner with family - in Pickering, no less, the suburb where the suspects were being held - and it's somehow possible to skip the topic entirely.

Not everyone, obviously, has been quite so nonchalant. The talk-radio lines and letters pages have been filled with plenty of hand-wringing. Someone apparently felt the need last weekend to break some windows at a mosque. But the sense one gets is that most Torontonians - at least the ones who live and work downtown, where any terror strike would likely hit - have modified their behaviour not one iota in the past week.

This is not the reaction we're supposed to be having. From the outset, the message from the media has been that we've been jolted out of our innocence. That life will never be the same. That it's time to be afraid - very afraid.

Even in the Toronto Star, which often is accused of bending over backwards to accommodate political correctness, that was the instant message from its most prominent columnist. "The time has long passed for domestic bliss born of ignorance, virtue and wilful denial," Rosie DiManno thundered on Sunday. "For everyone who thought Canada could cower in a corner of the planet, unnoticed and unthreatened by evil men - even when the most menacing of a very bad lot has twice referenced this country as a target for attack - take a good, hard look at what's been presented and what's being alleged."

Three days later, DiManno's frustrated Globe and Mail counterpart took Torontonians to task for their dismissive attitude toward the 17 suspects. Under the headline "It's a bit early for us to giggle so mockingly," Christie Blatchford opined that we brush off the alleged plotters as hapless boobs at our own risk.

Personally, I'd say giggling mockingly is just about the best thing ordinary civilians can do. Not because it's funny, of course, that a bunch of young men who grew up in Canada want to kill Canadians. But because giggling is the last thing in the world that those young men would want.

The point of terrorism, obviously, is to terrorize us into dramatically altering our public policies and our attitude toward life. In this instance, what the alleged suspects would want is to shake our faith in our liberal (they'd call it decadent) lifestyle. And they'd be particularly keen on scaring us enough to turn us against one another, ideally creating religious and cultural battles that tear the fabric of our society. They'd want Muslims isolated from the rest of the population, laying the groundwork for increasing radicalization. Conservative pundits (especially south of the border, for some reason) have delighted in pointing out this past week that, contrary to what we tell ourselves, Canada's commitment to pluralism does nothing to deter would-be jihadis -- indeed, that our pluralistic live-and-let-live spirit is exactly what the jihadis hate most.

This is true, of course: The sorts of people who want to blow up buildings aren't assuaged by our multiculturalism -- they're at at war with it. But then many of these commentators go on to argue, at least implicitly, that, consequently, it's time to question our faith in that brand of liberalism.

That's truly a bizarre line of thinking. The terrorists hate us because we're tolerant. Ergo, it's time to stop worrying so much about being tolerant ... thereby giving them exactly what they want. Huh?

For my money, the greatest blow against al-Qaeda didn't happen in Afghanistan, or with any arrests, or in this week's killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It happened on the streets of New York City, where the 9/11 terrorists failed utterly to change the inherently pluralist, liberal nature of the city as they surely expected killing thousands of New Yorkers would.

Our real test will come if and when terrorists strike Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver. But it's unclear why we would give what appears to be a bunch of failed terrorists - what appears, frankly, to have been a bunch of losers sitting around their basements plotting improbable schemes to decaptitate the Prime Minister - exactly what they want.

It's unclear how, exactly, we're "cower[ing] in a corner," as Dimanno alleged. Canada has sent troops to the most dangerous part of Afghanistan. It enacted tough post-9/11 anti-terror legislation, and banned terrorist groups. The police, intelligence agents and others who need to spend most of their time worrying about terrorism seem to be on the ball.

As for the rest of us, even the well-intentioned effort to get Torontonians to wear We Are Not Afraid T-shirts - what Bill Carroll was complaining about - is too much attention for these guys. Better just to giggle at them.