Je Suis Paris

Reflections on the nonsensical nature of hate and why we shouldn’t let it overtake us in the aftermath of the #ParisAttacks

In 2001, I had just moved with my family to a new house in a small suburb outside of New York City. My father took the train to work in Manhattan each day, my sister went to school with me, and my mother stayed home and took care of the house and us. I was seven years old.

I remember looking out the window of the yellow bus that transported me to school on September 11th. It was a sunny day, the leaves on the trees had barely started changing. It was technically still summer.

I remember sitting at the tiny desk that fit my tiny body, reading and drawing pictures as my classmates, one by one, were taken out of school by their parents. I dimly wondered where my parents were.

I remember being back at home, sitting in my parents’ huge bed and flipping through the channels, searching for cartoons to watch. I couldn’t find any — every channel, it seemed, was showing the same program, one where buildings burned and collapsed to the ground. One where people screamed.

“Where’s Daddy?” I remember asking my mother, who grabbed the remote control from me and switched off the TV. I remember my father walking through the front door, I remember the relief that I felt to have him close again even as I did not fully understand the danger he had been in or what was happening. I remember him trying to explain it to me, and I remember how my mind immediately brought forth a memory of my grandmother, telling me that she would never forget sitting at home, glued to the television, crying when President Kennedy had been assassinated almost forty years earlier. I don’t think I knew that this moment would stick in my mind the way that the President’s assassination had stuck in hers, but maybe I did.

Maybe even a seven year-old understands evil, to some degree — not the evil of the boy who pushes you down in the playground, or the evil of the teacher who gives you too much homework, but real evil. The kind that kills people in the hundreds or thousands, spurred by hate or false religion or revenge.

Last night, I was sitting on the living room couch of my one-bedroom apartment, three minutes south of downtown Los Angeles. I was watching television again, this time searching for programs featuring not cartoons but food — I was hoping “Chopped” would be on. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my iPhone light up. The white text lit up on the black background of my phone marked an alert from BBC News, reading “Multiple attacks in Paris — at least 18 people killed, French police say.”

My mind did not go to 9/11 or the JFK assassination this time. My heart was not nervous or fearful. It was simply saddened, deeply saddened as it seemed to consistently beat out the words “Here we go again.”

And here we go again.

It’s been over fourteen years since the terror attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. I have gone from an elementary-school child to a senior in college in that time — by the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11, I’ll be in law school. I have moved from New York to Los Angeles, but have returned to New York often enough that I have seen how my skyline has changed in the wake of the attack, I have seen the giant that has been built to avenge the loss of the Twin Towers. I cannot bring myself to visit the memorial.

Perhaps it’s a “west coast thing”, but the vast majority of my classmates and friends that are not from New York made no comment, no Facebook post or tweet, in commemoration of September 11th this year. Perhaps distance from the attack makes Angelenos feel safe, in a way that New Yorkers never will again. The flags on my campus did not fly at half-mast this year. Perhaps it only feels like forgetting to me, when in reality, it is closure. Moving onward and upward.

Perhaps.

But perhaps we really are forgetting, not only the hate that caused the 9/11 attacks, but also the hate that spread just as rampantly afterward. As a child, I accepted the longer lines in airports and extra security at Grand Central Station as efforts to keep us safe — I still do. In the months and years immediately following 9/11, I did not think about the hate, racism, xenophobia or Islamophobia that may have driven the men who forced my ailing grandfather out of his wheelchair at an airport in order to search him, because his skin was dark and his last name began with the four letters “Abou”. In retrospect, I’ve rationalized American Islamophobia as a desperate attempt to keep the country together — what, after all, forms a better bond between otherwise different people than the realization that they all hate the exact same people? Isn’t that what the phrase “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is all about?

I think we like to pretend Islamophobia isn’t still driving our actions on a daily basis — we like to pretend we have evolved past that, even as a boy named Ahmed leaves our country because of the humiliation he suffered after being arrested for building a clock.

Here we go again.

ISIS has taken responsibility for the attacks in France. They have hinted at future attacks. They are an “Islamic” terrorist group. But just as the actions of the Aryan brotherhood do not symbolize the actions of all whites, the actions of ISIS do not symbolize the actions or feelings of all Muslims. Almost immediately after the Paris attacks, I began to see posts on social media that demonized the entire religion of Islam and anyone who practices it, as if every Muslim person is equally responsible for the actions of a handful of cowardly, hateful people. I cannot help but ask myself when the hate will stop.

Can you not see that this is exactly what they want?

Those who spread terror, who murder people in massive numbers and take hostages and set off bombs in glittering cities where people are just trying to enjoy a Friday night and watch a soccer game, they want people to respond to their actions with hate. Hate is what they understand. Division caused by hate is nothing but helpful to their cause, because it will destroy their enemies from the inside, parasitic and gnawing, as they continue to fire at them again and again from the outside.

Do not accept the idea that hate will bring us together. It will not. Do not fight the hate of others with hate of your own, because it is all the same. I beg you to realize this.

Philosopher Albert Camus once wrote an essay entitled “The Myth of Sisyphus”, where he tackled the absurdity of the human condition and human existence. Life, according to Camus is absurd, and will always be that way. In his eyes, our world is truly a nonsensical place, and attempting to break it down into a place that does make sense is a wholly useless endeavor.

People, Camus wrote, need to stop searching for reason in an unreasonable world, and instead recognize the incomprehensible nature of our existence. However, he also believed that the only proper way to survive in this largely meaningless, crazy place was to consistently revolt — revolution, he wrote, would allow one to live life to the fullest even while understanding the meaninglessness and absurdity of their everyday actions in a world that, each and every day, shows us just how ridiculous of a place it can be.

My personal philosophic viewpoints tend to often clash with Camus’. However, at a time like this it is hard to assert that there is some sort of greater meaning to this all, to the deaths and the fear and the destruction. At a time like this, it is impossible to make sense of the world. And so (perhaps temporarily), I am choosing to follow Camus’ advice and will not try to make sense of the world right now. I will not attempt to break down what caused these people to do the things that they did; I will not attempt to understand what is incomprehensible or digest what is poisonous.

Instead, as Camus wrote, I will revolt. I will refuse to accept the hatred that is coming at me from all sides, I will not spout generalizations or acknowledge “us against them” mentalities. My revolution will be small and quiet, and if Camus is right — that all things are meaningless, then my revolution will be too.

But perhaps it won’t be. Perhaps it will draw attention to the absurdity of using hate to fight hate and fire to fight fire; perhaps it will push even one person to connect to someone else over a mutual like instead of a mutual dislike. This is a revolution of thought, of consciousness, that begs you to tackle your explicit and implicit biases and refuse to give in to the thought that they could ever be anything but hurtful. This is a revolution that implores you to learn from the past instead of forgetting it. This is my revolution, which I pray will someday lead to a time where my heart beats out the words “today is a new day” instead of “here we go again.”

This is my revolution. What’s yours?

Reach Columnist Ariana Aboulafia here, or follow her on Twitter.