Stop Parsing the Concept! Terrorism Is Indivisible

So a guy bursts into a house in New York state where a rabbi lives on a well-observed Sabbath, and starts stabbing people. He gets to five, and then he leaves.

Hate crime? Okay, if you want. But it's terrorism.

So a guy bursts into a school in Connecticut and starts shooting little kids. He gets to twenty, then he kills himself.

Hate crime? No. It wasn't done with racial or gender or sexual orientation intent. But it's terrorism.

Domestic terrorism? NO. Terrorism. Sudden, random violence with no other purpose than to destroy people.

Boko Haram kidnaps young girls in Nigeria and elsewhere. The men rape them to produce future troops for their evil purposes. They submit to rape or they're killed.

Domestic terrorism? No. Hate crime? Depends. Terrorism? Of course it is.

Terrorism is why I have a plan, however futile it may be, in case someone walks into my church and starts shooting a gun at members of the congregation (This just happened in Texas, and a trained person took out his concealed gun and killed the assassin, but not before two people died. This is allowed in Texas. I'm starting to think it isn't that bad of an idea.), even though we have a hired, armed security person on hand.

Terrorism is another Big Reason why I'm glad I don't have to teach any longer. Oh, yes, the topic of some kid walking into school with a gun came up every so often. I recall the first time. It was during the '70s, and I in a school district considered to be in the top ten in the state. I wasn't around the week after Columbine when someone scrawled a post-massacre threat onto a girls' bathroom wall, but once that word got out, plenty of traumatized parents--still recovering from the jolt of such a mass shooting happening in exactly the same kind of community theirs was and connecting with the possibility that the phrase it can't happen here no longer applied--freaked out and personally came to escort their kids out of the school. That was in the spring of 1999, now more than two decades ago.

Terrorism is why I don't go to big stores very much. It's why I wonder about my own sanity when I walk into a movie theater. It's why there should be little wonder at the immense growth of Netflix.

Terrorism is why Osama bin Laden won. Okay, we caught and killed him, but he won because 9-11 frightened us so much that we changed the way we look at the world and each other, and he continues to win every day we have these kinds of attacks. What he planned not only worked, but infused a mentality upon us that endures and proliferates, not in the sense of protection but in the sense of lashing out in revenge.

And Muslims--more than three million of whom live here--have almost nothing to do with it anymore. Has anybody noticed that the ethno-religious attacks now seem to be centered on Jews, and that non-Muslims are attacking them?

Anyone who's been paying attention knows that where, and when, terrorism happens is irrelevant to its specific description. It lives on. Every time it happens here, it perpetuates the notion that the greatest (though not the only) threat to our domestic peace is itself domestic and always has been.

Due to the legacy of 9-11, though, the legal community has seen it fit to parse terrorism and domestic terrorism, as if the two somehow have, in the end, different origins and effects. They don't. It's an easy, mindless leap to perpetuate fear of foreigners and then, mislogically, fear against those who look foreign, in some kind of mass whitewashing that's futile and pointless. One more time: Within twenty years--assuming humanity hasn't been completely ruined by climate change--the population of this country will be majority non-white--and there's nothing that can be done about it.

Let's start the year of 2020 with a vow that "living and let living" should be the watchword for us all, not wiping out people just before oneself is wiped out. Let's remember to be good to each other because, after all, the life you save could be your own.

Be well. Be careful. Happy New Year. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark