BY CHARLIE BLODNIEKS
It took me three days to fully absorb that lives had been lost; it took me three days to soak that notion into the core of my being, to let it shake me until there was nothing left but the despondent realization that humanity is cruel. I am haunted by the distant, looming voices of a body count we’ve yet to finalize.
I remember my initial reaction: panic. It was not the kind of panic that onsets like wildfire; rather, it was hesitant, inching, the kind of panic that gently tugs at the hem of my shirt and reminds me that I am only human. I texted my dad, “World War III?” Is violence going to breed violence yet again? Are we going to turn again to brutality in our fervent attempt to stamp out the ashes of our victims? I was so scared. I felt my mortality, but I felt it selfishly. I was not elegiacally pleading for the killing to stop; I was scared of dying.
But this is so, so much larger than me.
This is 130-odd lives, lost to a battle we will not see an end to. This is their loved ones, clinging onto shards of hope in the remnants of a now broken home. This is humanity, fallen to its knees.
That realization did not come until fifth period Monday afternoon. I was reading a piece on Paris, provided by a teacher who so nobly stopped us in our tracks to give us time to reflect. It was then that I realized that this tragedy does not just have a body count – those body counts have body counts, and the human life is irreplaceable. So I will be the first to admit: my initial reaction was selfish. I am now writing to make amends to my thought space, and pay tribute to the lives which were so horrendously ripped away. In a time of such utter loss of humanity, that is all we can do.
I am at a loss of words for how deeply I am feeling humanity’s pain. It is a slice to our collective vein, and everybody is bleeding today. It is not just the victims and their families (though I do not mean to devalue their grief) – it is humanity at large, and the immense jab at ourselves. It is the feeling as though our collective bodies have attempted suicide, and it is harsh. It is dark. It is just too deep a wound to cover up with band-aids. We did not simply lose 129 people; we lost a piece of ourselves.
I know my writing is just a drop in the bucket. I am a student with very little power behind my words; I am writing tribute amidst a mass array of professionals, and I know these words will go a very short distance. Yet, still, I must commit them to paper. What happens when we exist in the perpetual belief that our words are powerless? They become powerless. So, in this time of brutal emotion, I am one voice amidst many calling for peace. This is not a time to retaliate. This is a time to reflect upon our collective raw humanity.
We will never scorch violence with violence. The damage has been done. We cannot undo what has so egregiously happened, but we can prevent it from happening again. We can open our hearts to the victims in Paris, and we can turn the tides of war. I am not trying to perpetrate some leftist political agenda (nor do I have the power to do so); I am simply trying to urge whatever humanity we have remaining to win this battle. Maybe I’m far too much of a pacifist to write this from a place of true neutrality, but I believe that indifference in the face of tragedy is the last thing we can champion. We must not let this be just another loss of life. Life is so precious, and so plentiful, and if we let this fade away with no residual change, we are doing a disservice to the humanity in all of us.
