Raw over the cold-blooded murder of families in their own homes, and the fact that there are human brains out there that can plan, perform, rationalize, and defend these practices as strategy , or policy , or politics by another means. Or for that matter, in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Mali, Somalia, or a dozen other countries wracked by armed conflict.
That single fact might be enough for a lot of people to tell me I should just shut the hell up. In fact, they have as much to do with each other as politics and humanity — i. Or as just too easy for me to say. This is politics back in my head now, a matter of minutes after I ordered it away.
Politics never leaves. It only rallies its energies and comes right back to undermine you. From my right now, two all-too-familiar voices are piping up. They heard a rumor that someone on the Internet was trying to practice empathy. Subject to the caveats that yes: I was probably never in any real danger; yes : my state of fear was limited in time; and YES : I am part of an advantaged class that prioritized policies to reduce low-probability risks of terrorism over the abatement of conditions posing longstanding and pervasive threats to vulnerable communities because terror could get me and by contrast I was not a member of those vulnerable communities ….
I write all this fully aware that by any measure—duration, degree, extent of exposure, resources for protection—my experience nowhere approaches what is happening right now to too many people in this world. But it still seems a worthy exercise at least to try to recall those times and what they felt like, toward forming some kind of community with these stricken, broken families in the Middle East tonight.
I was a week shy of my 28th birthday when I first realized there were tens of thousands of people out in the world who would kill me in cold blood, if they had the opportunity. They had the funding, the training, the rationale, the will, and the nerve to do it.
