I was mercifully oblivious to the events of Friday night in Paris until I received a phone call from Molly. “Mom, I’m okay. I’m with Najwa and we’re nowhere near the city center.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, in what would be my last few moments of peace before learning that my daughter was living in the city that has become the front line of the war against ISIS.
Of course, then it was only a matter of turning on the news to learn the awful details of the latest crime against humanity: the worst attack on French soil since World War II, that country’s 9/11.
“Get to a safe place and stay put,” I ordered Molly. She and her friends were out that Friday night doing exactly what young people are supposed to do in the city of light and love. They were at a restaurant, thankfully, not in the 10th or the 11th arrondissement where the bloodshed occurred, but in the 13th, southeast of the Seine and away from the chaos. Still, the restaurant went on lockdown, and she and her friends were trapped for the night. “If you have food, water, and a bathroom, you’re good,” I told them. “Don’t move.”
After several hours Molly and Najwa walked to Najwa’s cousin’s house just beyond the city’s outskirts and spent the night. In the morning, with the Metro still closed, they walked back to their apartment in the 7th arrondissement, the district that houses government buildings and consulates, the district that borders the neighborhood of universities and young people, the 6th. While it may seem like these areas might be especially vulnerable to ISIS, the reality is that no place is immune to the randomness of fate when it intersects with bullets, bombs, and the hatred of radicalized religious fanatics.
The Paris terrorist attacks have raised many questions large and small about where we go from here. On a micro level, it’s about Molly and her safety, as she had planned to be in Paris for the coming year and possibly beyond, for graduate school. Is this where we, as parents, say no, you are not going to be studying in a war zone? Do we invoke the parental power of the purse strings and say there are many safer options; you don’t have to live in terrorist central to get a solid internship experience in media. Or would this be playing exactly into the hands of these terrorists who want us to bend to their campaign of fear and change the way we live and think?
For now, it’s good enough that Molly is coming home for Christmas, and on a United flight that was swiftly discounted in the aftermath of cancellations and second thoughts. But we have friends who were planning to spend the long Thanksgiving weekend in Washington, D.C., with their school-aged children, to show them the monuments of democracy and freedom. That trip has been put on hold, as ISIS has put our nation’s capital in its crosshairs. Without really intending to, we are already changing our lives based on the new reality of life in 2015.
One of the most profoundly troubling issues is the debate over accepting Syrian refugees into the United States. On the one hand, I completely agree with President Obama that it is our moral obligation to take in these people in their time of need. Victimized once by the war in their homeland, it would be cruel and inhuman to victimize them again in the name of national fear.
And yet it would only take one bad apple in a sea of legitimate freedom seekers to rain another torrent of terror on our psychologically battered nation. I can see the point of those who would argue that it’s too risky, given that one of the Paris terrorists had sneaked through as a refugee to take innocent lives.
We as a nation cannot give in to the fear that created the internment camps for Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor. And yet many of our nation’s governors are standing with the new House Speaker, Paul Ryan, to call for a “pause” in the inflow of Syrian refugees. Their fear is understandable. But their bias is not. The answer is to create effective screening programs and vet each refugee thoroughly, and not to blindly throw up a barrier to all.
There are no easy answers here. At a time when the world is shrinking, and opportunities for global understanding and advancement should be growing, we are frozen with the frightening possibilities that come with a lawless people with seemingly no moral boundaries. I want to keep my children home safe and sound. I want to forbid them from getting on board any plane. I feel like bundling up the family and moving to a farm in the nation’s heartland, Iowa, Idaho, Indiana, one of those states that start with an “I” are sounding pretty good right about now.
But the reality is that a gunman could enter a movie theater with a full round and an angry agenda anywhere, not just in Aurora, Colorado. Or an alienated young person with a severe case of mother hatred could decide to shoot up a school right before Christmas.
In his first inaugural address Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously declared, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” I am not ashamed to admit that I am fearful in a way that I have not been before, not even after 9/11, because back then, my children were small and they lived under my roof and I had some modicum of control over where they could be and what they could do. This time they are older and independent and out in the world, and I have very little control, either over their choices or the wicked crossfire of hate and intolerance that is incinerating human decency and hope.
Our dear friend Aneta, who lives in Paris with her husband and three small children, summed it up in a Facebook post, “I am scared for my children, I am scared for my country, and I am scared for our future.”
So am I, Aneta, so am I.
