News from Paris last Friday night and throughout the weekend confronts us once again with almost unimaginable cruelty and its underlying disregard of the lives of innocents. Thankfully we’re not inured, we’re not jaded, and in fact we’re sickened and outraged that our fellow humans, enjoying peaceful pursuits, matter to ISIS only as their slaughter inflicts pain on the rest of us.
We will of course plot and carry out responses, trying to somehow win a war against terror. The symbolic show of power and short-term gains from retaliatory air strikes and dramatic security measures are irresistible. But as we once again absorb the human tragedy around us, will relief be any farther along? Did our responses achieve breakthroughs, or even simply greater real security, after New York in 2001? Or Madrid in 2004? Or London in 2005? Or Beirut last week, just the day before Paris?
Our impulse to respond in anger and overwrought xenophobic demonization, shutting ourselves in, and shutting out the thousands of refugees from ISIS in desperate need of a safe place simply because they are Syrian or because they are Muslim, is both morally bankrupt and breathtakingly stupid policy after 15 years (if the clock started ticking just when American civilians became the targets) of foreign and military policy failure.
Each attack makes excruciatingly clear that the underlying causes of worldwide isolation and alienation — lack of access to basic human resources, and political, economic, and social marginalization centuries in the making and decades in the public eye — have to be acknowledged and confronted. We can love Paris and weep for Parisians, and we can all be Parisians in the moment, but we need to know that the indiscriminate violence and contempt we’ve seen at Stade de Paris and the Bataclan will be repeated over and over until we and our politicians get past rhetoric and retaliation and actually start to repair a fractured world.
