Is it Safe to Visit Paris?

Some months ago, at the height of the transportation strikes, several well-meaning acquaintances messaged me with concern or asked on behalf of friends who were considering travel plans whether it was indeed safe to visit Paris.

These people didn’t need a speech from me, I thought. My safest answer was, “Yes; don’t believe everything you hear from the mainstream media, whose business is built on chaos.”

But by the third time I was asked, I blurted out, “The people asking this live in the country which must be the most dangerous one for children in the entire developed world.” My fellow Americans, blissfully self-absorbed and aloof from the world, wonder if it’s safe to travel to Paris, which was dealing with strikes and riots (nothing new, something I’ve experienced regularly since moving to France). Yet in America, children are regularly gunned down in classrooms and people are choked to death on subways or on routine traffic stops. Those things don’t happen in France.

My unsafe answer concluded, “It’s certainly safer to visit France than an American elementary school.”

Do the trite words of “Thoughts and prayers,” which automatically and thoughtlessly escape the lips of many of my fellow countrymen after every tragedy simultaneously obliterate their common sense to such a degree that they consider the glossy…