Sirens blaring, shouts erupting from the smoke and debris filled streets, The City of Lights trembles in the darkness of recent attacks. Pain engulfs a city, a nation, and a global community, as fanatic hatred has rendered us once more on high alert. Let this not be a cause for continued xenophobia on a legislative level, let this not be an event to be exploited for political purposes, and may it never happen again, in Paris or anywhere. While I recognize that action must be taken against the forces responsible for the aforementioned attacks, we must always remember that bloodshed only leads to more bloodshed, and that evil cannot be combated with more evil.
The feeling of utter helplessness is one of the most indescribably crippling forces in this world, some of the more graphic videos from the Paris attacks have displayed men, women, and children huddling in back-rooms left to simply "wait," while shots and sirens ring out nearby. More and more, we find this world of ours becoming growingly chaotic, and too often it seems that we have less and less influence on what really goes on both domestically and when it comes to foreign affairs. The United States has spent years as well as hundreds of billions of dollars pouring manpower and similar resources into the wars in the Middle East, but what have we really accomplished? As Robert Fisk put it “Perhaps if we spoke more of “justice”—courts, legal process for killers, however morally repugnant they may be, sentences, prisons, redemption for those who may retrieve their lost souls from the ISIS midden—we would be a little safer in our sceptered continent. There should be justice not just for ourselves or our enemies, but for the peoples of the Middle East who have suffered this past century from the theater of dictatorships and cardboard institutions we created for them—and which have helped ISIS to thrive.”
Although much of the political right in the U.S. would have you believe otherwise, not all Muslims are members of ISIS, and Nazi-Germany era legislation like Donald Trump has recently proposed would be a form of terrorism in and of itself. After the atrocities to be revealed after the end of World War II in 1945, one might expect that no presidential hopeful would ever even so much as joke about implementing policies requiring members of a given creed, religion, or color to wear arm-bands similarly identifying themselves; but now Trump is suggesting exactly that—alongside mass-surveillance of all the nation's many mosques. Contrary to what some might have you believe, the refugees fleeing Syria are not all gun-toting jihadist fanatics looking to cause you harm. While some may argue that we should not accept refugees because we already have too many homeless on our streets, we must also remember that these refugees are not just flocking to our nation for socio-economic opportunity, they are doing so because to stay where they are potentially means directly risking their very lives. As a nation whose most famous monument the Statue of Liberty displays the following inscription “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” one might expect the U.S. to be more welcoming of the world’s many refugees.
