Where I Stand

In these past few days of helplessness and despair I have once again clung to metaphors of light penetrating the dark and love spreading faster and farther than hate. I, like many others, cling to such metaphors to provide comfort in a world seemingly gone mad, mad on every hemisphere, on every continent, in many countries, in many cities, across cultures far and wide, both near and far.

As a once English teacher now forty something suburban dwelling library media specialist at a public high school, I don't know the first thing about how to once and for all defeat evil, terrorists, fundamentalism, nor ISIS in particular. I am not an expert on historical alliances, current treaties, global economics, EU refugee policies, European constitutional laws, Islam, radical Islam, racism, sexism, or civil rights. Nor do I expect are you. But what I do know and believe deeply is that Edmund Burke had it right when he declared "the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good [people] to do nothing."

Our primary task starts with honoring the dead. It starts with the smallest acknowledgment, the simplest expressions of solidarity, the tiniest of olive branches extended to our nearest and dearest, and continues as we extend those gestures into larger actions, actions of hope. That hope dies when we criticize one another's impassioned responses to our own finite mortality and the search for a life fully lived, instead nitpicking at the approach or the attempt, instead of focusing and rallying around the intention.

So to those who have changed their Facebook profile picture to a French flag, I am sure if you had known more about Beirut's terrorist attack the day before, you now are thinking of them as well. The wave of red, white and blue I see awash on my news feed is a tangible way to express both outrage and support.

For now.

I recognize that for those who have visited France and Paris in particular, like me, the massacre speaks more directly to us but we are also not discounting other lives lost to terror in other lands, in other cultures. You and I stand with Beirut and every other location touched by the deaths of innocents.

Similarly, while the campus of UCONN is 45 miles up the road from me and I am no longer a student, I can condemn those who anonymously scrawled "Mahmoud killed Paris" on a dorm room welcome sign. I stand with those demanding UCONN students know and do better.

And even though I was never a student at Yale, nor the University of Missouri, I can empathize and feel the pain of those in your communities who feel discounted, threatened, and unsafe. I can stand with you to demand better. I can model how to be better.

Moreover, though I do not know what it feels like to be of color, I know that those who have championed #BlackLivesMatter are not simultaneously excluding any other lives. Of course, all lives matter, too. I can also stand with you.

In one week I will stand for Transgender Remembrance Day. This does not mean I also do not stand for any other lives lost or ruined in the fight for LGBTQ rights.

Honor the dead. Express your solidarity. Show compassion. Then take action. It is the only hope we have to preserve full lives of joy.