Fear steals your life – fight it by living your life as if nothing happened

When the terror attacks hit Paris, it was like the whole city turned dark on my inner map. I felt like all the beautiful places and all the wonderful memories from that city got covered in some blurred fog of darkness. For some hours I even considered cancelling my travel to COP21 in Paris.

This is what fear does to you. It steals your time, your life and your joy. Therefore we do not only have to fight terrorists with force and intelligence. We also have to fight the fear in our selves. If the terrorists succeed in making us scarred, they will have done much more damage and stolen much more human life, than they can with the attacks themselves. The terrorists want us to feel scared. We should not give them what they want.

So how do we fight the fear: First thing is to turn of the tv and stop watching the incidents unfold. These images are the first to make us scared. Secondly honor the victims and mourn them, but we shouldn’t try to feel the pain of the relatives. It will not bring their lost ones back to life. It will just replicate the fear and the pain. Thirdly we must go back to our normal life as quickly as possible. Live exactly like we did the day before. Live as if the attacks had not happened.

We should not budge an inch in respect to the human values and the freedom in our societies that the terrorists hate so much. If you create any kind of terror legislation, make sure you do not undermine the rights of people. Make sure you don’t create a legal state of emergency, that can later be abused for other purposes. Keep speaking out and say what you want to. Keep writing what is on your mind. Keep telling the terrorist that they are cowards. It is not courageous to attack innocent people.

We must be aware on part of the tactics of the terrorist. They want to split us up. The day before Paris terrorists killed 43 people in Libanon. We should not be less outraged, when terror hit areas out side of the West. On the contrary – young people from all regions need to feel that they are of same value to the World community.

Internally in our countries we should make sure that we do not run the errain of these radicalized groups by isolating and deamening people. If we do that we create easy prey for radicalization. We don’t want to help them. We want to fight them.

I am on my way back from Paris now. From the second I set foot in Charles de Gaule I felt there was no reason to be afraid. Paris is still full of beauty, life and happyness. I didn’t feel scared for a second and I enjoyed every moment of my time there. As if nothing had happened.