Paris, and the need to Do Something

Paris, France has endured the worst attack on its citizens since World War II, I am sure it will be days until the dead and injured are counted, and weeks or months until the details of the attacks are known, but we do know the attacks were terrorism, and that the attackers were probably from an Islamic group based on comments survivors reported hearing from the attackers.

People are also going to want to Do Something, or to see their leaders Do Something anyway, and therein lies the problem I think.

We can debate the causes of terrorism all day, or night as the case may be, and there are a lot of reasons for it that I am not even going to try to claim to be an expert on, but the goals of terrorism are pretty clear, and those goals include forcing their victims to Do Something, there are a lot of ways a country can react to terrorism, and virtually all of them are wrong. They are rarely as wrong as the US response to 9/11 but they are rarely right either, possibly there is no right reaction to it.

The is that knee jerk reactions are exactly what they want, at their most vigorous, prejudiced crackdowns on religious and cultural groups are a recruiting tool for terrorism that is unmatched by their own propaganda, and even tightened security and restrictions on travel or speech, or increased monitoring, play into their hands, as we make ourselves into an image of the society they want us to be.

See, rarely are terrorists interested in murdering a bunch of people to convince a country to give their citizens additional freedoms, foreign terrorists honestly don't care what we do to our own people for the most part, the idea that they "hate our freedom" is stupid as hell, they may hate us, and depending on how religious they are they may want us to die for our beliefs, but they don't hate our freedom, they hate us, or our policies, or our actions, and domestic ones are all for making life worse for, if not the majority, at least a significant percentage of the population.

A country that reacts to a terror attack by inflicting attacks of its own, or that reduces the rights of its citizens to prevent additional attacks is doing their job for them, we reduce ourselves to their level and do their recruiting at the same time. I think we can only win doing doing nothing.

Well, not nothing exactly, attacks should be investigated, those who instigated them should be captured an prosecuted, and the networks involved, if any, should be taken apart, but we already have ways to do that that do not involve bulk collection of cell phone records, sealing the borders, or stigmatizing entire racial groups.

We must accept that attacks will happen, we must accept that there will be casualties, we can't let them turn us into monsters like them though, they shouldn't get to shape our policies and they shouldn't be the ideal we turn to when we respond to the urge to Do Something.

I hope the government and people of Paris make the right choices in response to this, I hope no more have to die tonight and I hope you all have someone you can be with or talk to if you are scared or sad.

If you have an axe to grind about racial inequality, gun control, American terrorism, or another issue as it relates to today's events, can you hold it for a day please? Think of the victims today first, help them if you can, bu supportive if you can't, be silent if you can't do either.

Be safe, I'll talk to you tomorrow.