When There Are No Words...That's When We Need Them Most

My heart is heavy.

That is a phrase that I hear people use….that I myself use or think…in the wake of horrifying tragedy. It is appropriate to school shootings. It is appropriate to natural disasters. It is appropriate to the atrocities associated with war.

Like what happened last night in Paris.

Because I don’t think there are many people who disagree now that we are at war. We disagree about how we should fight an enemy that has no borders…no traditional government…no infrastructure nor military installations nor single spokesperson at whom we can shake our fist and unite against. ISIS, much like Al Qaeda, is a terrorist organization…a network of cells. Kind of like cancer. Just like cancer cells establish strongholds in the body, ISIS cells imbed themselves in communities where they are either welcomed (by providing security where a national government can’t or won’t) or can exist undetected long enough to plan an attack within that community (thus creating a need for the aforementioned security) and then they send new recruits elsewhere to establish new fortresses. 

We know that cancer can be treated in several ways ranging from localized surgery to remove a small number of cells to aggressive chemotherapy which can ravage the person with the hope that it will kill the cancer before it kills the body. With cancer, early detection is the key because surgery minimizes damage to the rest of the body. But once it has spread, chemo is often the best and only option. This would also be true of ISIS, but my fear is that they have spread so now that a swath of poison is the only answer.

But how have they spread? How are they able to recruit from within the very communities in which they unleash their terror? I have a theory.

This morning as I was doing my daily Twitter scrolling, I happened upon a Ted Talk from March of this year. It was by a French journalist named Jean-Paul Mari and it began with his retelling of an experience in which he encountered death while he was in Baghdad during the first weeks of the Iraq war.

It’s about 15 minutes long and I would strongly suggest that you watch it – especially if you’re going to continue reading this. I’m not really worried about making anyone angry, but the video will lend context to what you read and that might mitigate any reactionary contempt. Here is the link. Turn on the English subtitles unless you are fluent in French.

Or if you want to be angry – which is the emotion that most of us want to embrace in the wake of a massacre like we saw last night – go ahead and read. And get mad at me. I’m okay with it.

How many people…first responders, witnesses, survivors…stared into the void of death last night in Paris? How many of them looked at something that, as Mari suggested, we are not supposed to…not physiologically equipped to…look directly into? Like the sun.

When I am forced to drive into the sun, my body involuntarily reacts. My hands instinctively reach for the visor to attempt to shield my eyes from the blinding light. I am aware that if someone were to step in front of my car, I would not see them. I try to use my peripheral vision as I monitor the traffic around me so that the visual disruption doesn’t cause me to have an accident. We cannot look directly into the sun without it literally damaging our eyesight.

I submit that we cannot look directly into the void of death without it damaging our souls. 

It is worst for those in the immediate vicinity. They are forced to look the carnage in the face. And just as our bodies instinctively react to protect our eyes, our psyche instinctively reacts to protect our soul…though the damage has already been done.

The trauma has occurred.

Soon after, those who experience cannot sleep. They cannot function as they did before. “They want to be loved, but they hate everyone.” They believe they are dead because they have seen it…and the only way to see death is to die. Right?

Mari proposes that “the only way to heal from this trauma is to find a way to express it.” Not express it in unhealthy ways…not though alcohol…not by beating your spouse…not by taking your own life to relieve the pain. Express it in words. Name it.

“In the face of such a horrible image – a wordless image of oblivion that obsesses us – the only way to cope with it is to put human words to it. Because people feel excluded from humanity.”

And words…language…are what make us human.

Feeling excluded from humanity…that seems like just the kind of vulnerable state that might make one decide that nothing is worth it anymore. If someone already feels emotionally separated from the world, it’s not a leap to want to make that separation permanent…in a physical way.

Looking at this in the context of war…it is estimated that around 59,000 American soldiers lost their lives during the Vietnam War and that an additional 102,000 committed suicide in the years that followed. That is the power of death – of looking into the void of death – and not naming it and expressing it. PTSD took twice as many people as combat did simply because we did not allow them to really tell us what it was like. We want the adrenaline rush…the heroism. We do not want the whole story.

In war, there are also the bystanders…they stare into the void of death in the collateral damage around them. The people that we call collateral…they just call mom or brother or friend. This seems like just the kind of vulnerable state that would make fertile recruiting ground for a terrorist organization that trains suicide bombers. They can feel the love – or at the very least, the inclusion – that was lost in that moment of trauma, while feeding their hatred, as they slowly march toward an explosive suicide.

What do they care? They are already dead.

And that’s how an organization like ISIS (or a gang, for that matter) operates. They cause the trauma and then immediately provide a way to express it…when everyone else has moved onto the next crisis.

I fear that we are in danger – depending upon how we react – of doing more of the same ourselves.

“Blow them off the map.” I read that this morning in reaction to ISIS’s claim of responsibility. Ok…but could you please point to me on the map where it is that they reside exactly? If we start blowing things off the map, we are going to cause more death…some of it likely justified…but some of it collateral. If we rush to act…to appear decisive…do we not risk creating more and more that we will have to figure out how to fight?

I’m really opening myself up to criticism by asking all these questions because I don’t have a better alternative. Not a concrete one anyway. But I feel like it’s a conversation that we need to have as onlookers too.

We live in a world where we can bear witness to (if not look directly into) the void of death through our phones, computers and televisions. It’s not the same, but if the outpouring of emotion I’ve seen on social media is any indication, it definitely has an impact. “Blow them off the map” wasn’t uttered by a congressional hawk or a military general. This was uttered by a woman in America’s heartland.

And boy do I understand it.

I am angry. I am sad. I am scared. I am shocked. I am uncertain. I can’t stop picturing the scene at the Bataclan. It’s playing on a loop in my mind and I wasn’t even there. My reptile brain says,

Ready…Shoot…Aim. 

In that order.

But my human brain – the one that uses words to express my pain – knows that is not the answer. Even though it may not know what is the answer.  There are many of you who will simplify this and say, we can’t worry about the minutia in war…but I believe the minutia…like a single cancer cell…is where it all begins.

The people of Paris are responding to the minutia. There are people in the heart of Paris taking to social media with this:

#PorteOuverte – OPEN DOOR.

People in Paris – a country that we lampoon in American pop culture as being home to the world’s most aloof and condescending citizenry – are opening their doors to people who were (and maybe still are) stranded throughout the city unable to return to the homes and hotels. They are offering shelter and comfort to those who have stared into the void of death and in doing so, they are reflecting “the better side of humanity” at a time when many might begin to feel excluded from it.

What if they accidentally harbor one of the shooters? Authorities aren’t even sure they got them all.

I’m sure there are plenty of closed doors as a result of that sentiment – if I was in Paris, mine could very well be one of them. Fear is a powerful motivator and it is the seed from which exclusion and isolationism are sown. But I am in awe of those who posted their personal addresses on Twitter and welcomed strangers into their homes in the middle of the night – on a night in which fear could easily have won. I want to be like them.

Like police and medical personnel and other first responders, these door-opening-mirrors-into-humanity are the helpers to whom Fred Rogers was referring in that familiar quote which is often – correctly – pulled out of the archives at a time like this. They are the ones who remind us that there is more good in this world than bad.

As long as we don’t let the bad bring out the worst in those of us who are good.

My prayer for the next several days as Western leaders work to decide upon the appropriate “proportional response” is that they do so with both the big picture and the minutia in their minds and in their hearts. This is a time for the smartest and most thoughtful people we have on the planet to step forward and offer solutions – not a time for people with only their own self-interest in mind to offer more rhetoric to feed the hate, fear, and sadness.

How can we respond more like helpers – helpers who are in it for the long-haul -- rather than like those who opened the void of death in the first place? How can we offer space to grieve our pain and name our trauma?

I’d rather be part of the thread that sews up the void of death as opposed to a force which tears it wide open.