Paris and the Aftermath

It is difficult to find the right words that would accurately portray the dismay, the fear, the anger, and  the sadness that much of the western world feels as it reflects upon the events in Paris. It is difficult because there are no words that can portray our collective horror. The range of responses in the last twenty-four hours has been interesting.

There are of course, those yahoos who lurk on the fringes of various social medias who are already pontificating that the attack proves that Canada should not allow any immigrants into our country.  I am sure that there are, in every European language, similar comments on other Facebook pages. There are, thankfully, an even larger number of those (although that might be because of who my Facebook "friends" are) who have combined their picture with the tri-colours of the French flag or who have used some other neat app to show their solidarity with the French people. Political commentators, depending upon which network is paying them, dance that careful two step of wanting to look politically correct while at the same time acknowledging that there is some legitimacy to being afraid.  I suspect however, that future historians will not spend any time looking at our emotional and frequently short responses but instead will study our political responses. For it is by those responses that we will be judged by the future.

Part of the political response must be to examine who the suicide bombers were. Were they always radicalized? Had they been taught by their fathers that violence was the only way to convince people to listen to you? Were they "soldiers" who hid in the great waves of refugees streaming  into Europe as a result of the Syrian war? Were they French citizens, or had the at least been offered the opportunity of citizenship? Had they had access to a reasonably useful education and at least knew that there was a possibility of employment that was meaningful and sustainable? Were they young people who felt engaged in their society and who felt that that society was evolving and changing to meet the needs of its members? I, Of course, don't know who profoundly those misguided terrorists were. In the upcoming weeks we will hear little bits of pieces about their lives - but we will never truly know who they were. And that is a shame because it is only by understanding what led them to this outrageous act, will we prevent others from doing the same thing.

Everything I know and believe about society says that people act in a deviant fashion when the bonds to that society are weakened. That people act in ways that are destructive to themselves and their world around them when they have no allegiance to that world. And that the degree of destruction is directly related to the degree of alienation. No one destroys something that they are willingly part of.  It needs to be clearly stated that no rational person could ever justify the random killing of a hundred plus French citizens.  But these terrorist were not rational - the fundamental question must be what made them irrational. What made them so vulnerable to this doctrine of hate and destruction? If we can't understand that - then we are doomed to having to find words to accurately portray the dismay, the fear, the anger, and the sadness again and again and again.

 It should be noted that our collective horror is restricted to this sort of thing happening in the "West". Such events, while perhaps in not quite these numbers, are a far more common event in other parts of the world - we, in the west, are just less inclined to notice them.  

Moving #3 - What a mess!!

I suspect/hope that other people are better at moving than I am. It is not as if I have not done it before. This will be my third time moving 5,000 kilometres. One would hope/assume that I would be getting better at it. I don't think that I am.

I have so much stuff!! In spite of my best intentions to de-clutter my existence, I am having an extraordinarily hard time doing so. Take for example my books. I love books. In every room of my house there are books laying about in various stages of being read. I love the thought of books, of touching them, of opening them up and getting lost into whatever story the author has decided to tell me. I long ago decided that I would not keep any novels. At one point I had an eight by ten room whose walls were hidden by bookshelves filled with books, two layers deep. I never put a book up on those shelves unless I was interested in reading it again. It saddened me to get rid of those books but we have libraries that are more than willing to keep those books and hundreds of others for me. And now, of course, we have those same libraries lending books on-line. So with the exception of some boy's novels (mainly by Henty) that belonged to my father and a few other books, I have very few novels to get rid of. Of the handful of paperbacks I do have, they will all go to the library to be resold at their next used book sale.

I however, have a large number of text books. One of the many joys of teaching at the college level was receiving books from the publisher who hoped that I would order that text for a class. I read every one of the books given to me. I never chose one for my class, but for the most part I enjoyed reading them. I also have a number of other non-fiction books that I have collected through the years. Do I keep them? Why? The odds of me ever teaching sociology or community development again are so remote that even the most ambitious odds maker in Las Vegas could not do the necessary calculations. But some of the books were really good and have important data in them. I have other books - some that I have had for years that are important to me - my first book of poetry that I ever bought (Cohen's Flowers for Hitler), John Porter's The Vertical Mosaic (the first theoretical  book that I read outside of school work), some plays I worked on at university, a book about Hitler (from which I wrote a paper in some ways admiring his sociological skills in mastering the public's emotions - it was the first time that I wrote a paper that I knew was doomed to not be like by a professor and did it anyways) and other assorted books that mark milestones in my intellectual/academic/ emotional life.  So I will keep about half of my books - which still leaves me needing, in my new place to create space for about twenty feet of shelving. I had hoped to do better. Perhaps I will do one more cull before I seal up the boxes.

Disposing of books always makes me sad. It is not only that I am leaving good human friends behind as I move out to the West Coast, I am also abandoning some friends - some of whom have sat on my bookshelves for over thirty-five years. They have given me pleasure by their feel, their smell. their content and sometimes, as books are almost the first thing I unpack when I move, their very look upon their shelves telling me that I am home.