Paris At The Wall

Reality intrudes, disrupts, and completely shatters our self-delusions.

No wonder we would rather distract ourselves with speculative, future crises such as climate change – even labeling it the number one threat to global security. It’s there where we can take some comfort in expensive gestures while trashing, even stifling, those we deem unwashed. It’s a cause whose end result we won’t live to see, and so has the effect of neutering critical voices just as effectively as the boy who cried wolf one last time.

We need, desperately, to feel in control of the uncontrollable.

But Paris reminds us that there is an existing threat in the here and now. We don’t need to extrapolate from potentially manipulable data, we don’t need to speculate as to the end result.

The threat is clear. It is real. And it is obvious.

Paris is now under attack. But it will not stop there.

ISIS, and its affiliated groups, have not been at all coy about what it is they hope to achieve in the west.

Yet we have chosen not only to mask our eyes and cover our ears, but to also bury our heads in the sand for good measure.

But willful blindness has never been part of a winning strategy.

Our leaders, the international community, and the media need to get real.

And we need to make them focus.

I want to encourage you to pray.

Pray for the victims of Paris. Pray for peace.

But don’t stop there.

Call or write your representatives in Washington, educate yourself on the issues, get involved.

But more than anything, demand that the 2016 Presidential candidates tell us what their strategic plans are for neutralizing both the short-term and the long-term threats.

And no, threatening to “Bomb the [crap]” out of ISIS is not itself a long-term, or even a short-term, strategy. It’s meaningless bluster, no matter how viscerally appealing.

This stark reality may not be something that we wanted to deal with right now. But it certainly brings the threat into sharp focus.

We need to be ready.

We can and will be ready.

And we will survive.

But pray for courage anyway.

Peace

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons