Love Bomb

If you came here looking for answers, I don't have any. Not good ones, anyway. What happened in Paris last Friday defies easy explanation. The fact that there was even a heartbeat's hesitation between the time these attacks occurred and the moment that it was described as a terrorist attack surprises me. Forty minutes of coordinated gunfire and explosions can only be described as terror, and those who perpetrated it can only be described as terrorists. Maybe I am somehow to blame for this. Throwing shade, as we call it here in the hood, on ISIS only serves to make them mad. Not in the "angry" sense so much as the "insane."
When the scope of the attacks became apparent, the Pollyana vision of the massacre had us all looking for any kind of relief. Only four people were killed at the soccer stadium. The number of fatalities overall could have been so much worse. But if only one new orphan or one new widow was generated out of this chaos, any number higher than zero is unacceptable.
When mass killings happen here in America, we don't tend to look for responsibility. We look for blame. We blame mental health care or bad parenting or gun laws. Video games. Rock and roll. The night club where most of the gunfire was unleashed had the American band, Eagles of Death Metal, on the bill. Paris was burning, and it was easy to figure out who was to blame.
Or was it? According to ISIS, the soccer match between Germany and France was targeted because it featured teams from two Christian nations. The sad irony being that both teams field a number of Muslim players who were every bit as mystified by the sudden disruption of their game. "Could have been worse," is how we continue to look at it. "Never should have happened," might be another. At this point, I am willing to surrender in the war on terror. You win. We're terrified. Of course, we're also angry. Angry enough to rattle our sabers and close our borders and send more soldiers off to foreign lands only to incite the fierce hatred of soldiers in foreign lands.
What's the answer? Air strikes? Drones? All this high tech weaponry doesn't seem to compete with a backpack full of plastic explosive. Maybe it's time to think outside of the box. Like the neutron or dirty bombs, we could find a way to send out radiation that would leave buildings standing and instead of destroying life, it would spread love. Aerosol-delivered MDMA. Ecstasy from the sky. Hugs all around. The love bomb.