In the wake of what happened in Paris this week, the international community will bond together over those innocent men and women stolen from their lives by acts of terror. People will make speeches, have moments of silence, and the French flag will temporarily wash over Facebook photos from New Zealand to Newfoundland, from sea to shining sea. Words like life, liberty, and phrases like the pursuit of happiness will grace the lips of Americans appalled by the violence, and similar things will come from German, British, Japanese, Brazilian, and a whole host of other affected, empathetic peoples. We will talk of bravery, of freedom, and of courage and of the will for those that lost to go on with strength in the face of such adversity.
And we should. Humans, by our very nature, have the capacity for communal love, for bonding in times of need and suffering to help those that cannot help themselves. In these moments, we realize, if only briefly, that our combined efforts are greater than the sum of our parts, that something about our connection strengthens us. Even the idea that we have the support of others can begin the healing process.
But while the wounds are fresh, while the tragedy burns in our collective minds, while the red white and blue bars grace the Empire State Building, Christ the Redeemer, and our sacred monuments worldwide, let us take a deep breath and think.
Cultures from the Middle East and the West have been at war for at least 2500 years, since the Persians and the Greeks, and though the faces and names have changed, the ideals and the misunderstandings have not. It's easy to make villains of the other side, that group of people that looks different, sounds different, and that thinks differently than you do. It's easy to dehumanize those people that suffer for our actions because we don't fully understand them, there is an element of unknown about them, and we fear the unknown. We have trouble relating to them, and worse, we start to make assumptions about them. We group them together. We fail to separate the terrorists from the civilians because they look like those that hurt us, they sound like those that hurt us, and they share some culture as well. We put a Middle-Eastern face to this evil, and likewise, they put Western faces on the drones that fly overhead and the tanks that roll through their streets, regardless of why the tanks and drones are there.
And fear and anger flow both ways across the Mediterranean. The people of France, much like the people of these United States fourteen years ago, will want vengeance. They will want the heads of those behind the plots on a platter for what they've done. Revenge, I believe, is one of the most basic human feelings, but I also believe that, in this case, it stems from that communal love, the idea that your community has suffered, and that you will do whatever it takes to prevent that from happening again. That you will do what it takes to prevent this from happening to you and your loved ones someday, perhaps. Consider then, the idea that this violence is a cycle 2500 years old and perpetuated by both sides motivated by self-preservation, cultural pride, and in some cases, this sense of community that we feel towards our fellow countrymen and women.
Then consider that evil can wear any face, can speak in any tongue, and feeds on fear and hatred. There are terrorists that live among us that look like us, that sound like us, and that have some of the same culture as we do. There are people that would breed fear and hatred with Western ideals and white faces. Extremists can walk in any skin. Terror does not stem from the Middle East, and terrorists are not all Middle Eastern. They are a brand of people that have lost respect for human life and dignity.
Which leads me to believe that the vengeance we feel should not be geared towards any one terrorist organization but towards terror itself, towards hatred, fear, and suffering. When we eliminate the members of ISIS, will another sect of radicals, spurred on by those Western faces on our otherwise faceless bombs, spring up in its place? Will the hatred permeate through the communities affected by our war on terror, and will they continue to fight against us? Will they feed off of the fear of the strikes that come in the night? Because if they do, one generation from now, we will have a whole new crop of zealots ready to take lives in the name of their community, religion, and culture.
What then, if we stopped the cycle? What then, if we took the opportunity to demonstrate the full and awesome power of our ideals, freedom and democracy? What then, if we executed a kind of vengeance that targets fear and suffering under the global banner of peace rather than taking more lives? What if, instead of sending our troops to fight them, we sent our troops for a more constructive purpose?
I wonder if we could fight this terror with concrete, plaster, and steel, with words and books, with medicine. I wonder if going into war-torn Syrian or rural Afghanistan, we could build schools and roads, hospitals, factories, and farms, the sort of infrastructure that breeds stability and peace. We could show the people that these extremist organizations prey on for their soldiers, that we, the West, have their best interests in mind, that our freedoms, that our ideals are for more than armies and bullets and bombs. We could show a culture that might not understand us exactly what we stand for: peace, health, education, and equality, or put another way, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We could show them that we, fellow human beings caught in the hands of time along with them, are their brethren, their community, and more than capable of bonding together to overcome. That the sum of our parts, Western and Middle Eastern, is greater than the whole.
What if every bag of grain, bottle of water, or brick sent over in aid to the areas affected by ISIS and the unrest in Syria had the name of someone that suffered and died in these attacks? What if they all said, "In memory of..." to remind the people receiving them exactly why we care, exactly why we fight suffering of all kinds? What if we remind these people in our times of hardship, that we are there for them, that we do not fear them, that we might not understand their particular suffering, but that we do understand loss? What if we remind each other that we are all human?
A life taken too soon is a tragedy, no matter what skin that life walks in. I don't wish to see another innocent person lost in the name of vengeance. The only way to prevent this type of violence is to break the cycle, to wield education and healthcare and essential supplies in the place of our hatred and fear. The only way to prevent this type of violence is to wage war on the violence itself.
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