It is too easy to give voice to what feels right.
There are always reasons to make war, to gird our armor and make wild faces, to breathe into our lungs moral indignation and outrage, to expel vengeance. There will always be desperate people in the world, whipped up by prophets and madmen, who are ready to exchange their misery for paradise or oblivion.
That these people are more like us than different is hard to face in the aftermath of atrocity. At times like these, it's easier to imagine them as less emotionally and psychologically complicated than ourselves. At times like these, it's difficult to remember they have the same capacities for love and fear, and that we are all a part of the same provisional species, more fragile than we know, subject to being blown like dandelion seeds from the face of the world.
Yet we cling so hard to life for it is all we know, though we suspect its ultimate insignificance. Most of us feel compelled to insist on some higher purpose than the biological, on kinship with the gods. We want to believe something out there cares for us, that it attends to our politics and is capable of being offended by our indifference to or denial of its covert clockworks. It is so obvious we know so little, that our science is inadequate to understanding the deep vast blackness in which we have been wrapped, that it is comforting to believe essential and immutable information has been installed in us by whatever made us.
It is too easy to believe that we can find within ourselves all the truth that we require, that we have a special relationship with the universe, that what roars up in us in times like these is our most authentic and focused and best self. It is too easy to be charged with righteousness, and too difficult to be kind.
It is right to mourn Paris. It is obscene to exploit it. God did not allow it in order for some of us to make use of it as a talking point. Paris did not happen because your brave and lonely voice was ignored. Paris was not a gift for your Facebook or Twitter timeline. It is not your chance to advertise your personal toughness.
Paris happened because cruel and desperate people willing to die for some intangible idea took advantage of the relatively liberal rules of a diverse free society to do as much damage as they could before they were stopped. In the aftermath, we might discover all sorts of vulnerabilities that might allow them to murder more than they otherwise might have.
But all freedom carries implicit risks we should willingly assume. Paris would not be Paris with the gendarmes checking papers on every corner; a Fortress Europe or a Fortress America is not something we should want or accept. We want to live as we live, guaranteed nothing, but with abiding hope.
And no, what happened in Paris is not more special than other atrocities that happen every day in the saddest places on the planet. It is not right that we have become inured to news of violence in places like Lebanon or in Africa, but that is exactly what we have become. But even in those most dangerous places, most people find a way to live peacefully most of the time--even in Beirut people go to clubs and restaurants, people laugh and fall in love and wonder what their children's children's world may look like.
We know bombs blow up in Beirut. We know atrocities happen every day, in places we describe as "troubled" or "war-torn." Places most of us don't go, places many of us can't find on a map. Places that some of us would, given the power, consign to hell.
I am not saying we should love those who have declared themselves our enemies, but we need to understand that they are human beings who have made a plan. Randomness is part of their design: They want you to feel insecure, like there is nowhere in the world safe from their ruthlessness. Part of the reason to attack people after hours, at a soccer match or when they are out for dinner or at a concert, is to demonstrate to the rest of us that there is nowhere beyond their murderous reach. They want us to feel exactly as we now feel: shaken, unmoored and angry enough to lash out.
They want this chaos; they want their crimes elevated--they want a war.
They shall probably get what they want, for it is easier to raise an army of earnest young people and incite in them a sense of patriotic pride and faith in the chain of command than it is to follow the examples set by Gandhi, King and Christ. It is easier to bomb and drone than touch fanatical hearts.
What is impossible is too much to ask. So we don't ask it. We are not saints; we have the right to protect ourselves and the duty to protect others. In pursuing these goals it is inevitable we will kill and maim innocents, we will commit atrocities of our own.
But perhaps we should refrain from hardening our own hearts with zealotry. Perhaps we should remember that justice, not vengeance, should be our end, that the true architects of horror have no need to shout, and only rarely is the man in the street with the gun the one who has designed the nightmare.
We must be strong. We must be brave. But we must also try to be kind.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 11/17/2015