For everyone that boldly states we must not give in to terrorists by living in fear, I agree. For every person that continues to move about in locations that draw crowds seeking leisure, companionship, and community with intent to stretch their middle finger in defiance to terror I applaud. For those that can do so without hesitation and without an occasional nod of insecurity to glance around to measure their fellow humanity within suicide belt reach I especially applaud. Unfortunately, this is not who I am. I am rightfully fearful and believe we have everything to fear including fear itself. There are heavily armed monsters next door that worship death, and too many shallow and clueless politicians who are vendors of fear.
Somehow our world has created and unleashed an epidemic of de-evolved "Frankenhuman" monster body snatchers electrified by an insane perverted religious imperative to slaughter the innocent. It is as if the darkest evil imagined in movies that were created to entertain us has escaped from behind the viewing screens to infiltrate and reside among us.
I fear there is no way for humanity to retain freedoms we cherish in open societies to destroy these monsters in the World War of Terror. I fear there is no way to completely eliminate the savages salivating to take human lives. I fear that at best, the governing class can only talk bold and deploy newsworthy measures in hopes to sooth the masses while in secrecy build the Biggest Brother infrastructure too frightening for prime time debate. I am fearful and fearful of that fear that the world we knew shifted on 9/11 and the world we know ended in Paris on November 14, 2015.
The short sightedness of the massively militarized jingoistic 20th century has caught up with humanity just fifteen years into what was heralded to be a new enlightened humanity, a world where a profound Star Trekian shift in consciousness would give the 21st century peace, prosperity, a world without hardened borders requiring passports, heavily armed patrols and calculators for evaluating monetary exchange rates. The world was supposed to shrink along with the distance between cultures as technology and social media would be a unifying, equalizing and assimilating dynamic. We could finally boldly go without fear.
Instead, we are a world destabilized, fractured, more competitive than ever, armed such as never before, with peoples having accessibility to information and resources to organize and coordinate attacks to wreak havoc on civilian populations. The prospect of some rogue group finally acquiring a weapon of significant destruction and using it feels inevitable. Folks everywhere know they are vulnerable everywhere. Folks everywhere know there are more pain, terror, and body snatching from more Frankenhuman cells yet to pop up. Folks know they are at a jumping off point and their patience, humanity, and capacity to forgive and look bold and compassionately into the future are about to surrender to a raging vengeance. Folks everywhere are wishing for a political savior that cannot exist to free them from this dystopian world. Sadly, the current Republican presidential wannabes have nothing to offer except to feed this state of fear and loathing and anti-establishment.