You've all probably heard of what happened in Paris yesterday. And maybe you've heard about the two other attacks today in the south of France. Yesterday, two armed gunmen broke into the offices of the satirical, but controversial magazine Charlie Hebdo during the daily editorial meeting and began firing. Twelve are dead, and at least four are critically wounded. It is said to be the deadliest terrorist attack in France since 1961, when the OAS (Organisation de l'armée secrète), a paramilitary group that wanted to keep Algeria under French influence bombed a Paris-Strasbourg train, killing 28.
This morning, a policewoman was shot dead by a lone gunman south of Paris and a bomb was detonated inside a kebab shop near a mosque in Villefrance-sur-Saone a small town the east of France.
All of this is scary. It's scary for me, because I'm now living in a nation under attack. And I'm sure it's scary for you because there's a kid all alone now living in a nation under attack. I would give a lot to see my family right now. I don't see a lot of trust around me anymore. I actually find myself feeling strangely paranoid. I watch my step whenever I'm outside now, and I'm curled up on my bed locked in my house as I write this. You can never be too careful. Even going outside the school was a big ordeal.
I wonder what this means for the rest of my trip. If there is another large attack like these, France will go officially under "Alerte Noir," or Black Alert. I don't know if I'll be able to go home, and if so, when could I come back? Will the rest of my stay be marked with checkpoints and the sentence "Papiers, s'il vous plait?" I also noticed the U.S. doesn't have a terrorism threat level meter or anything like most other developed nations. Either that or I've simply lived my entire life with it on "high."
That's really what I saw today. People living with their own threat levels on "high." We had a minute of silence for those killed after a short discussion about the attacks. The minute went fine, but the discussion actually worried me. A lot. In my class of around thirty, there are three Muslim girls. They are all smart and friendly and helpful just good people all around. But as soon as the conversation started they became incredibly defensive and started attacking anyone that even hinted at something anti-Muslim. For example, my friend Adrien suggested that the attackers were "simplement des mauvais Muslims." That roughly translates to "simply bad Muslims." He's not wrong. They were extremists of the worst possible kind. It's a little broad, but it gets the point across. These men are not admirable Muslims, nor are they the image of an average Muslim. But one of the girls immediately began putting him down. I didn't catch all of what she said (she talked pretty fast), but what I got was that she didn't think he understood her religion at all and that we were all of us attacking her beliefs. We weren't attacking her beliefs. And most of us had at least tried to understand the ins and outs of Islam. My class is not ignorant. My class is not racist or sexist. My class does not hate Muslims. My class is actually impressively diverse and genuinely tries to have a good discourse. I felt like she didn't see that. And the subject matter wasn't even Islam. It was an attack on free speech above all else.
But I can see where she's coming from. I can't even imagine the harassment Muslims must get on a daily basis just for being who they are. With all that negative exposure, it's probably easier just to assume everyone is against you than to try and make the individual difference between hate and support. The discussion continued like that for the end of the hour. It really worried me.
I just hope that it won't get any worse.
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