Keep Your Wits, But Your Mind As Well

Violence is the last refuge of the weak. The brainwashed, deluded slaves of savage megalomaniacs can decide to take people's lives, but only we can decide whether or not they take our minds.
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People come and go, but cities rarely die. The chronology of human activity is littered with the fossilized remains of broken, hate-filled ideologies lying limp and lifeless in the desolate wastelands of history. The Sun sets on all bad ideas eventually after the UV rays of light burn them to a crispy crust, unable to withstand the forces of natural decomposition any further. However, basic biological in-built hardware is a lot harder to shake off than the viruses of bad ideas. At some subconscious level, one of the most pressing questions in the mind of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, must be what do you do about a problem called love?

It's been with humanity since the beginning and when it comes to biology, old habits die hard. Brothers in arms with the traits of empathy, kindness and just general basic happiness. And it's not just restricted to humans, of course. These traits are displayed throughout the animal kingdom where religion is a phenomenon unheard of. In trying to defeat humanity itself, Daesh are effectively pitting themselves up against biology and everything that encompasses.

The absurdity of choosing to fight humanity itself hardly needs pointing out, but even if one believes in Allah, then one usually believes that such an all-seeing, all-knowing divine being also created everything, which by definition, includes the laws of nature. Isn't he going to be pretty miffed with the extremists if they are attacking his decision to spread emotional qualities all over the world in every animal imaginable from humans to hippos and pigs to penguins?

The United States obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and yet both came back to life as thriving centers of human achievement. Paris has survived terror attacks before from Daesh, Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, the PLO, the Nazis and one of its most famous residents, the coward Carlos The Jackal. That last one, of course, has the rest of his life in a prison cell to search for his balls.

Violence is the last refuge of the weak. The brainwashed, deluded slaves of savage megalomaniacs can decide to take people's lives, but only we can decide whether or not they take our minds. We can choose to play their games or we can carry on living on our terms. If anybody is conflicted as to the most effective way of responding to Daesh, they would do well to read the incredible viral Facebook post of the French journalist Antoine Leiris who lost his wife in the Paris attacks. The original post is in French but ITV have published it in English.

I'm not suggesting we shouldn't take the extremists seriously (we should) but as citizens, we pay our military, police, politicians and secret intelligence agents to protect us as best they can. Let them worry about it and help them where we can. Let's all contribute to the debate about how as a society, we can best deal with the terrorists and sympathizers, but let's conduct it in a sensible way. If the world manages to unite on this issue in some meaningful way, then those hidden eyes will have more to fear from us than we will from them. As a human, I think what has happened in Paris is an epic tragedy, so let's honor the victims by carrying on as normal.

Tomorrow the sun will rise.

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