Chris Banyas
Editor-in-Chief
By now you have undoubtedly heard of the events that transpired across the French capital of Paris on Friday, November 13. Over the course of roughly one hour, from 9 to 10 p.m., a chain of terrorist attacks occurred which left, at the time of the writing of this piece, 132 people dead and at least 352 wounded.
Before I go any further, I feel I must make it clear that this is most certainly a tragedy, and my sympathies go out to all those involved or that were in some way affected.
Perspective is something that has largely disappeared in the modern age: the by-the-minute newscasts and social media updates have cast our focus onto such a minute measurement of time that the bigger picture is often lost.
In 60 minutes, 132 people died.
To attempt to put this into a broader perspective: 2.2 people were killed every minute.
On September 11, 2001, 3,015 people died in terrorist attacks upon the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon over a time span of 102 minutes.
I include the lives of the hijackers themselves within the statistic because they were just as much human beings as the people they targeted within the buildings and airplanes.
The 9/11 attacks claimed the lives of 29.5 people every minute.
On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb dropped by the U.S. on Hiroshima, Japan, instantly vaporized an estimated 80,000 people, and three days later, in Nagasaki, Japan, another bomb unleashed by America instantly killed roughly 70,000.
In summation, in two seconds on two different days, 150,000 people were turned to ash, their shadows burned into the Earth.
No matter the statistic, however, I do not believe that human suffering is quantifiable.
He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? He said.
Yes, We’re still the good guys.
And we always will be.
Yes. We always will be.
I love how the amount of discussion regarding “turning a certain region of the world to glass” increases significantly every time something happens that is tangentially tied to Islam. (Maybe these people aren’t actually ignorant, bigoted, unsympathetic, uninformed, individuals have actually fallen victim to the ravages of the window market?)
Undoubtedly some Muslims somewhere will fall prey to some sort of “retribution” for these attacks, even though targeting a Muslim because they might identify themselves as the same religion that said terrorist act was embarked upon for the glory of isn’t that dissimilar from young Muslims joining a terrorist cell and attacking Americans for dropping bombs on civilians who happen to live in the same region that terrorists have occupied.
Any loss of life is tragic, and I feel like there is and has been a strong movement toward the devaluation of life that presents itself as diametrically opposed to your own.
In other words, the Us and Them mentality that is, I think, impossibly to avoid in times of conflict.
Targeting civilians is abhorrent, but was it abhorrent when we bombed Japan in 1945?
Perspective.
What is also tragic is the fact that the gunmen and bombers that perpetrated the attack found themselves so far away from normalcy to be in a place where such actions were actually carried out.
Every terrorist, murderer and bomber is someone’s child, and in my opinion it is equally tragic that the state of the world in certain corners today makes things like this possible.
Perhaps a level of hubris on the part of the first-world countries is in part to blame for the current state of things: as mentioned before, looking at things in the light of Us and Them will only further perpetuate the divisions that keep us apart as human beings.
And maybe there isn’t a drum circle solution to everything. Maybe, in the words of a very observant butler, “some men just want to watch the world burn.”
I am a firm believer that, whether atheist, polytheist or monotheist, the time we are allotted in this terrestrial existence is precious: watching people hang off ledges while sounds of gunfire ripped apart the interior silence of a French city block reminded me of this.
While those who were killed will not have another chance to appreciate their time, all those of us who look on will, and owe it to the fallen to do so.
Until the aliens get here, kill off about two-thirds of human life on Earth, and unite humanity against a common enemy, chaos will continue to reign.
I find solace in something apropos to the Parisian attacks: Michel de Montaigne was a French philosopher, and clearly knew a thing or two about this very subject.
“The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them…Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.”
