It has been about 60 hours since a small group of men went into the streets of Paris with machine guns and explosives to inflict a kind of damage the most fortunate members of our generation can barely fathom. Even still, we can’t quite wrap our thoughts around what happened on a balmy November night in the city of lights.
There is ample photographic and video evidence of these staggering attacks and their aftermath. News outlets have offered maps and timelines and first hand accounts from people caught in the line of fire. There are a lot of questions that remain, of course, but it is easy enough to unfold the grisly series of events that, at this point, seem to have culminated in 13 fighter jets dropping 20 bombs on a city in Syria. (We have no photos or videos or interviews from Raqqa, but it is safe to assume that the blood is as red and the people are as frightened.)
I, myself, have spent the entire weekend wallowing in images and descriptions of despair and horror. This is because, like so many, I want to understand what happened and why. I want to solve the very complicated equation that brings an end to decades (centuries?) of reciprocal violence between distant parts of the world, historically conflicted religions, and powerful men vying for more power.
For most of us, the media, social and otherwise, frames the window through which we are viewing this painful moment in history. And now that anyone with a login can be a commentator, the view is suddenly more stark and more immediate. We can now watch the world grieve in real time. And, oh man, do we ever suck at grieving!
I get it. Your feelings are huge. It’s too soon to work through more than one or two of them and yet they just keep coming. I’m feeling them too: the shock and disbelief, the horror and fear and anger, the profound, heart sinking sadness for the loss of so many young lives. I understand. And, you know what, I’m totally okay with you expressing them, even in public and in print. I unloaded my own cognitive dissonance on my bookface feed Saturday morning, concluding that, like our old pal Socrates, I know only that I know nothing about any of this.
I know nothing about human grief of this scale, about the anger that can make people (not monsters, not terrorists, not Islamists—people) inflict it. I know nothing about the politics behind their anger, nor the people and circumstances spurring it on. I know nothing about the measures we have taken or will take to keep ourselves safe or, hopefully, change the world enough to prevent more danger to more people.
I’m not alone in my ignorance. With the very rare exception of ambassadors and intelligence specialists, regional historians, international legal experts and humanitarians on the ground… Aside from the people who truly know from their own vast experience about the full scope of factors contributing to the ongoing conflict in our world, not one of us has the faintest clue about anything other than that string of unsettling events we watched through the video recordings and recalled testimony of people who were there, with their own limited points of view.
But we all react differently in a crisis. Some of us inherently go into caretaker mode, cleaning the wounds of the injured and listening to their cries. Some of us become quasi-detectives, searching tirelessly for clues and patterns that can lead to root causes and prime suspects. Some of us are more analytical, interested in finding solutions. Others are big picture thinkers intent on putting the moment at hand into a larger perspective. Others still feel our emotions in the moment and can only take action later. None of this is right or wrong, it just is. As with all things, individual results will vary. This is something that our current public discourse doesn’t understand, and simply cannot tolerate.
I considered writing a blog about why these attacks are more painful to so many Americans, who have actually walked the streets of Paris and associate them with very fond memories, than the more remote and equally awful attacks in Lebanon, Nigeria and Kenya in recent weeks. I wanted to scold my big picture friends for trying to shame others for their experiencing their own, very human forms of grief. But I stopped. I thought. I took a moment…
Which is what we all need to do. Take a moment.
At university, I studied creative writing, not a particularly salient field to the events that continue to unfold before us. I learned a particularly important practice in all of those years of drafting and work shopping and crafting and revising, however. While it is very important to make note of life’s emotionally wrought moments, one should never consider the work created in those moments a finished product. That work will need further thought and revision. Every. Single. Time.
Now is not the time for armchair analysts, political candidates or media pundits with no expertise to be using sentences that begin with “We should.” Our best hope is that the leaders we have elected have the wisdom to set aside politics and listen to the intelligence, security and military experts who have spent their careers understanding the causes of this violence and devising effective ways to address it without further destabilizing the world and other peoples’ nations. Now is the time for us, the rattled and saddened public, to feel, to comfort each other, and to trust the wisdom of those with deeper understanding.
When your finger is itching to send that angry or accusing tweet, when tempted to give an analysis based only in your biases, when talking to an equally frightened friend who disagrees with you, keep in mind that we are all very different humans feeling very similar emotions. When all else fails, think of the families grieving those 130 Parisiens and just how much time and gentleness they will need from us in order get back to a totally altered form of normal. Patience, people, and trust.
postjulia 