Hysteria in NYC as dimwitted suspect leaves rice cookers around town

In this day and age of mass shootings and terror, one would be quite the dunce to play a prank involving either or…yet here we are.

New York City has an all-too-close relationship with terror, and has for decades.  In 1993, terrorists attempted to bring down the World Trade Center by detonating a truck full of explosives in the basement.  Eighteen years later, they succeeded in one of the most extraordinarily horrific acts of evil that our modern world has ever existed.  Those airborne attacks created a global schism.  We now measure our experiences as pre-9/11 or post-9/11.

New Yorkers have had an extremely hard time moving past those emotions, and they may never fully heal.  That’s why the latest news out of The Big Apple is so disturbing.

A pair of suspicious rice cookers shut down a subway station in Lower Manhattan on Friday morning — but the NYPD’s Bomb Squad later determined they were not explosives, authorities said.

Another cooker was found near a garbage can in Chelsea just over an hour later. It was determined safe just after 9:40 a.m., according to cops.

Police urged straphangers to avoid the Fulton Street subway station because of the first two packages, which were reported by a 911 caller.

Pressure cookers were used as improvised explosive devices in the dastardly Boston Marathon bombings of 2013.

Some New Yorkers were defiant in the face of possible terror, however.

Therese Brand, 61, of Queens, said she left her office when she got an alert on an app — but insisted that “no terrorist is going to scare me from doing my job.”

“If a bomb goes off, that building is coming down and we’ll be in the middle of it,” she said, but added: “I’m used to a lot of this stuff. I was working at 30 Main St. when I saw the towers go down on 9/11.”

Police are zeroing in on a suspect in West Virginia, according to the latest reports.