I have no memories of boarding a plane with a simple ticket. No memories of a time where the Middle East purely held some of time’s oldest historical monuments. There’s no cavity of my mind that stores a time when I could walk into a public event completely free of the fear of terrorism.
At the age of 6 years old I, along with millions of other small children, watched 3,000 people jump, burn, and be crushed. I watched fathers weep and families break. I may not have understood what was happening then but at that moment the rest of the world, a world we were to grow up in, was changing forever.
At the age of 10 I was familiar with the concept of a shoe bomb. An item that just five years ago I was learning to tie. An item that I now knew could be turned into a weapon to hurt, to kill, to destroy.
The movie culture moved from the archetypical ex-Soviet villain to the “I hate America” Middle Eastern terrorist. Movies like Christopher Nolan's "Batman" trilogy featuring villains with names like Ra's Al Guhl and an overall plot completely based on terrorism. While we stared at our IMAX screens, our latent fears stared right back.
Throughout sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth grade my friends and peers would begin to make jokes about terrorism. The crude humor filled baseball fields, was whispered in classrooms and yelled on playgrounds.
At 15 I could turn on the news on almost any given night and be berated by the terrorist acts of the Middle East. The sounds of gunshots, bombings and governmental words of condemnation exploding from our televisions became background noise for the dinner table. Here we all are now, the millennials, making jokes, watching movies of almost comical Middle Eastern evil, unable to board a plane without being annoyed at the depth of airport security.
Foreign terrorism at first terrified us. It petrified us and it confused us. What did it mean? Why do those people hate us? We asked our parents, we asked our teachers, we asked each other. Our parents told us it was because we lived in such a privileged country. Our teachers told us the Middle east was simply an area of conflict and always has been. We told each other whatever we needed to. We couldn’t make sense of it.
How could we grow up in a world and made such enemies that we had never met? As we grew we turned to media to explain it. We turned to our reassuring blog posts on facebook. We turned to the movies. We turned to the news to fill in the gaps. However, did any of these really show us what we wanted to see? No, maybe not what we wanted to see but it did show us what we needed to see. What we wanted to see was just enough to take the subject into an introspective state of resonance with ourselves. Enough to bring us together and make us feel some sense of community in reverence.
And for the older generation that’s exactly what it did. But, for us there seemed to be a different effect. Terrorism became sensationalism. The very solemnity that terrorism thrives off of became a teenage joke, a cavalier news cast, an assumed presence. At this turn of our thoughts it no longer terrified us. The sensationalization of terrorism may be viewed by some as an ignorant showing of a millennial’s sensitivity (or lack of) but in reality its what we needed to do to move forward.
The Charlie Hebdo incident that occurred in early January is a show of exactly how terrorism should be viewed. With an attrition of the actual terror itself. Charlie Hebdo did the right thing by publishing what was published and was essentially a step in the right direction. Taking the terror out of terrorism.
In order for terrorism to be effective it has to terrify the victim. With today’s sensational coverage of terrorism we are no longer, in the full sense of the word, terrified. Terrorism can not be fought with terror. But the idea of terrorism can be taken away with an attrition of terror. Growing up surrounded by what I, what our whole generation was surrounded by, became not a hindrance for us but a way we can and do deal with terrorism. Without terror there is no terrorism.
