Not terrified

Well, it happened again.

Some people, hoping to stir up goodness knows what, used explosives to destroy lives and landmarks in a peaceful city.

It’s tragic. It is every time this happens. Violence always is, and especially when lives are lost and those who survive are left to cope. Anyone who has not personally experienced loss like this can even begin to imagine what it must feel like.

And those who do are helping the perpetrators achieve what must be their goal, if the moniker we’ve given them is accurate.

But the thing is, it’s become a bit boring.

For those experiencing loss in Belgium this week and, over the past few months, in the Ivory Coast, in Turkey, and in all those countries so familiar with terrorist attacks that news organizations have simply ceased to report them, our hearts should be with them. The victims are still victims of senseless acts.

But for the ones who commit these crimes: The modus operandi, the motive, the use of weapons against the unarmed few who happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, it’s just dull. We’ve seen it before—many, many times. And we’ll see it happen again, to be sure.

Perhaps this is just the artist in me but I feel like there’s no creativity in trying to get a message across in the same damaging performance over and over. Like a series of bad action films, eventually, the majority of the population stops getting excited over it.

Of course, we shake our heads and condemn the violence. Of course, the discourse over the effectiveness of our law enforcement, religious zeal, xenophobia and inequality surges for a few days. But we don’t seem to have the patience or the attention span to continue beyond that.

So what’s the point? Why does this keep happening? Do the people who commit these crimes ever see a satisfactory outcome? If what they truly want is terror, they’re only achieving the opposite— dulling our senses until news of bombing in European airports or stadiums elicits little more than a pithy platitude from the general public as they read about it in the news, on Facebook or wherever we get our news these days.

No, we should care about the people who have been affected by these crimes. But the criminals themselves we should treat with no more regard than we would any other criminal.

And the crimes they commit, regardless of their motivation, we should regard as any other crime. They should not be given the prestige of words like international, war or terrorism. They are just crimes.

And the more they happen, the more uninteresting they become.

mihal@mihalzada.com