Brussels
Dozens dead in coordinated bombing attacks in Brussels.
I was a teenager when the first President Bush led the way into the Gulf War. I remember watching the night bombing raids on CNN (a first, at that time) and being absolutely terrified that the world would eventually be drawn into a war. I called one of my friends that night - a quiet, practical sort of girl - and she was terrified too, which made it even worse. My parents had experienced war footing in a distant way during Vietnam, but invading Iraq was my first understanding of global geopolitical violence.
Almost a decade later I stood in the newsroom of a local paper and watched the first tower of the World Trade Center collapse into Manhattan live on a big screen tv. I was surrounded by strangers, news people, and everyone was silent and devastated. You could've heard a pin drop in that place. I remember thinking (when thinking started happening again instead of witnessing) 'This will change everything'. And it did. It changed our future, how we feel secure, how we fight battles, how we view people. It made the world small and exponentially scary at the same time. It eroded our trust and honor. It made us afraid of our neighbors, it pushed and dented and prodded our personal privacy, and it made many of us think about guilt first over innocence. Sometimes I wonder what life would be like now if 9/11 had been averted. Would we still have come to this point regardless?
Embassy bombings, mass kidnappings and public beheadings, viral recruitment and radicalization, terror alerts, terror attacks aimed at civilians purely for mass casualties... We all get enraged for a while each time a new event happens, but it's becoming commonplace. Like President Obama said when discussing mass gun crimes in the U.S. - at some point this has become routine. You can learn to adapt to almost anything, even something horrible, if it falls into some sort of expected pattern. If you had told that scared teenager in 1991 that global terrorist acts would become a real and regular threat in her future world, she might have thought you were spouting dystopian science fiction. It's not something that many of us outside of the Middle East had any experience with, and we certainly didn't have the mindset to accept it. But it appears that now we do.
The paradox of terrorism movements is that there is no victory, no decisive winning stroke, ever. They aren't fighting a war - it's not an abstract ideal, it's their life. People who are that angry stay that way, they just find new targets to focus their rage on. And, similarly, governments will never quash terrorism completely. As the media has shown us, these groups are a snake with many heads. The leadership, the structure, even the goals of these groups can change, but they never go away. So, we're at a stalemate. We just keep fighting, keep losing things on both sides, we just keep calm and carry on. This is the new normal but I hate it. I hate the futility of it, and I hate that we're all inured to just withstand it until something else happens.
I was a teenager when the first President Bush led the way into the Gulf War. I remember watching the night bombing raids on CNN (a first, at that time) and being absolutely terrified that the world would eventually be drawn into a war. I called one of my friends that night - a quiet, practical sort of girl - and she was terrified too, which made it even worse. My parents had experienced war footing in a distant way during Vietnam, but invading Iraq was my first understanding of global geopolitical violence.
Almost a decade later I stood in the newsroom of a local paper and watched the first tower of the World Trade Center collapse into Manhattan live on a big screen tv. I was surrounded by strangers, news people, and everyone was silent and devastated. You could've heard a pin drop in that place. I remember thinking (when thinking started happening again instead of witnessing) 'This will change everything'. And it did. It changed our future, how we feel secure, how we fight battles, how we view people. It made the world small and exponentially scary at the same time. It eroded our trust and honor. It made us afraid of our neighbors, it pushed and dented and prodded our personal privacy, and it made many of us think about guilt first over innocence. Sometimes I wonder what life would be like now if 9/11 had been averted. Would we still have come to this point regardless?
Embassy bombings, mass kidnappings and public beheadings, viral recruitment and radicalization, terror alerts, terror attacks aimed at civilians purely for mass casualties... We all get enraged for a while each time a new event happens, but it's becoming commonplace. Like President Obama said when discussing mass gun crimes in the U.S. - at some point this has become routine. You can learn to adapt to almost anything, even something horrible, if it falls into some sort of expected pattern. If you had told that scared teenager in 1991 that global terrorist acts would become a real and regular threat in her future world, she might have thought you were spouting dystopian science fiction. It's not something that many of us outside of the Middle East had any experience with, and we certainly didn't have the mindset to accept it. But it appears that now we do.
The paradox of terrorism movements is that there is no victory, no decisive winning stroke, ever. They aren't fighting a war - it's not an abstract ideal, it's their life. People who are that angry stay that way, they just find new targets to focus their rage on. And, similarly, governments will never quash terrorism completely. As the media has shown us, these groups are a snake with many heads. The leadership, the structure, even the goals of these groups can change, but they never go away. So, we're at a stalemate. We just keep fighting, keep losing things on both sides, we just keep calm and carry on. This is the new normal but I hate it. I hate the futility of it, and I hate that we're all inured to just withstand it until something else happens.