No Longer Feeling Safe?

I hear some of the younger people in this society say they no longer feel safe, after the orchestrated events of Easter Sunday. Some were teens in the last stages of the Civil War and have only known a few short years of peace, in which to enjoy a freedom their peers in other countries have benefitted from. They were starting to feel a sense of optimism, and hope and possibility.

But terrorism knows no borders, and now no place on earth is immune to it. There are no safe spaces, in the world today. And whatever safety we feel may be temporary, and self-created - and yet that sense of safety is what makes us able to trust and believe in a better future, and act positively to make it happen. 

Governments cannot effectively provide such safe spaces, through increased security, increased vigilance or punitive sanctions. Terrorists are like snipers or guerilla forces - trained specialists targeting their victims -  individualized, entrepreneurial, radicalized mass murderers. Scapegoating minorities is no solution to the kind of wide scale damage these small numbers of people can perpetrate. These are people who benefit from the fear of others, and in whose eyes acts of atrocity are not shameful acts of cowardice but, somehow justifiable acts of merit. 

We live in profound uncertainty, and without safety, without guarantees or affirmations. And yet we must live: we cannot accept a cowering marginalization as our default condition. We must go about our daily lives. 

The sanctuary people seek in places of worship is being violated all over the world. And it is almost impossible to refrain from pursuing a predictable path of vengeance and retribution, for this gross disrespect. But the very predictability of it suggests that we are being manipulated. Now is the time to be mindful, and not reactive: not merely to be fuelled by fear and survivalism, but by a bigger vision of who would profit from minorities being prompted to turn on each other. 

I suggest that instead of mourning a sense of safety, we accept - not that we are not entitled to such safety, but that it is currently, in these conditions, not accessible to us. That the rights we thought we had: to live in peace, and dignity, and freedom, to co-exist in tolerance with others, to enjoy the fruits of a hard-won and fragile harmony, are now being openly challenged. And we are not alone: every country in the world today is facing this, alongside us. 

We need to deliberately create the safety we want to experience. In the face of its opposite - not just the hideous masks of terrorism, but the reactiveness of past responses. This is not going to go away. And it is not the same terror that was vanquished before. 

     Instead of mourning our lost safety, we must resiliently develop our strength. 

Strength is strength of mind, and will, not cowardice in the form of hate speech and violence. 

- Sunday Island 2019 -