Courage Reborn

Today is the annual day of reflection.  For me two small events that occurred on November 14, the day following the Paris attack, represent the despair and the hope left by 2015.

No one was singing the words.  Everyone knew the song and felt its plaintive prayer course through their souls.  Ordinary people gathered beyond the yellow tape encircling the ordinary places people go, ordinary places that became killing fields.  Near the entrance to Bataclan Concert Hall where scores of people perished, Davide Martello pedaled his bike, his grand piano in tow.  He stopped, sat on the piano bench so his fingers could urge the keys to comfort the bewildered, bemired, beleaguered crowd who longed to Imagine. 

The night that preceded this dawning day was filled with exploding tweets and posts as the facts, conjectures and theories raced through the same web used to recruit willing killers and to coordinate this attack on humanity.  Searchers looked. The social media generation took to Facebook or Twitter to find the fate of friends –  friends who attended a concert, cheered a football team or dined in a streetside café.  Through the night reporters from around the globe descended on Paris to report the harvests of hatred, the fomented fear and the calls for retribution. 

Investigators worked quickly.  Some perpetrators were killed.  With their guns silenced, bomb squads disarmed devices.  Coconspirators were identified.  Raids on their lairs resulted in leads to follow and arrests in France and other countries.  Among those confronted, some resisted, committed suicide or were killed. 

Religious words spewed as reasons for acts that neither faith nor religion condones.  In Europe fear throttled the innate human instinct and religious commission to help the poor, the troubled, the displaced.  Here in the USA, mongering fear became political strategy.  As if any religion bestows ownership of property, walls and laws, not human suffering, became the grist of political speech.  The actions of the Paris terrorists are no closer to Islamic tenets than turning away immigrants and hovering cowardly behind walls is a Christian precept.

Being terrorized is painful.  Worry escalates to helplessness and on to panic and fear.  Fear should not accompany a couple going to dinner nor to the concert of a favorite band.  When killing and terrorizing is used as a tool of domination, we must be vigilant and vigorously pursue and punish those who terrorize.   The police, militaries and intelligence agencies of the world are amply funded and well equipped to carry that responsibility. 

In all of the stories that follow acts of terror, only one theme lasts.  Whether Pearl Harbor, Dallas, 911, San Bernadino or Paris, we don’t point with pride to the walls we’ve built nor to the righteous rhetoric that engulfed and explained the event.  Courage lasts.  Courageous acts lead us back toward the balance where attending a sporting event is fun without fear.  It is true that by being courageous enough to live our lives, more of us will suffer or die.  Some of us will be riding an airplane unaware of a terrorist’s bomb in the luggage compartment.  Some of us will be shopping in a mall when AK-47 ammo flies and the stench of cordite fills the air.  Some of us will breathe poison gas or eat food laced with botulism.  Most of us will not.  Courage is irrelevant without risk but there will always be risks.  Risks abound and courage is the antidote.

In front of a makeshift memorial of flowers, candles, photos and notes, Angel Le, a Parisian, knelt and talked with his son for a reporter who was probing how one small boy was processing the events of that Friday in Paris.  His frightened son said, “… we have to be careful because we have to change houses…they have guns, they can shoot us because they are really, really mean daddy.”  As Mr. Le looked into his son’s eyes, he said, “It’s okay, they might have guns but we have flowers.” 

Courage to live freely and humbly, above all else, may be that last best hope for six billion humans to live on this planet, to share God’s creation regardless of the faith tradition or deity each person may follow.   With the resolve to be courageous, we can welcome 2016.

--td