17 February 2015: By Popular Demand

BY POPULAR DEMAND

I have a confession to make: I haven't written a blog post on this site for nearly two months (which you'll probably be able to tell by taking a glance at the side bar—last post: December 18). I've been very flattered to receive questions—and some downright demands—about my next posting both online and IRL (a frightening acronym if ever there was one, but that's for another blog...), but I have another confession: I just haven't felt like writing in a while.

As many of you who have a smartphone, tablet, computer, radio, television or eyes and ears are probably aware, the satirical Parisian newspaper "Charlie Hebdo" was the subject of a terrorist attack on January 7th. While the event was not directly connected to anything in the city save a decades-old grudge against a paper that prints things in very poor taste—which incited a heinous act in even poorer taste, resulting in the deaths of many—it brought Paris to a standstill. Growing up post-9/11, I'm no stranger to living in a country that's constantly on the lookout for potential terrorists, but experiencing the fear and fervor in France was new to me. New and very scary.

Joshua and I happened to be out on a television project (I'll announce it soon, though some of you already know—and the secrecy seems ridiculous) that very week, Wednesday through Sunday of the attack on the paper, the subsequent shooting of the policewoman, the hostage situation and killings at the Jewish deli and ensuing manhunts. We were being driven by van all over the city to various neighborhoods, both ones in which we've lived and ones we've only ever seen on foot, which was both a reassuring and damning experience. It was reassuring because, while reports of pandemonium and further terror threats splashed across headlines all over the world, we were seeing firsthand many of the places tourists were being told "not to go under any circumstances" due to riots, demonstrations, violence and the like. The reality was infinitely weirder than the headlines made the atmosphere out to be. While there was indeed a very large march in the Place de la République (which throughout history has played host to almost weekly demonstrations, though none have topped this one for the sheer number of participants), the rest of the city was back to business as usual in a matter of hours. Yes, police presence had been stepped up and menacing "Vigipirate" (the French version of the terror alert system) signs had been posted at all schools, monuments and government buildings, but otherwise, people were still going to work, flooding the metros, walking their dogs, eating food. Almost nothing had changed...only everything had changed.

What Joshua so astutely observed while we were trying to make sense of our altered milieu is that what had been affected was not the actual safety of the majority of Parisians—17 people dying (gruesome though it was) out of a population of 2.2 million puts the percentage of carnage in acute perspective—but rather the sense of perceived safety that we all take for granted every single day. Sure, I occasionally think about the fact that the metro I'm riding might be carrying a bomb—terror acts aren't usually announced until they're, y'know, detonated—but otherwise, I take for granted that, due to sheer mathematics, the likelihood is that I won't be affected in my day-to-day life. What the terror attacks did was raise the tension in the city to such a palpable level that it felt like everyone was expecting bombs to rain down from the sky at any moment, blanketing the city in chaos and carnage like never before. The reality was that three sick individuals decided to take their hatred and anger out in a violent manner and were subsequently pursued and killed. End of story. Or is it?

The problem with sensationalism is that the 24-hour news cycles need fodder, and when something frightening and terrible happens, they milk that fodder for all it's worth until all that's really being recycled is fear, not facts. That same week, thousands of people were killed in the Nigerian city of Baga by Boko Haram, considered the group's deadliest attack to date. But here in France, at least, all that we kept getting blared from the news outlets was "Je Suis Charlie" (and, if you had a good eye, "Je Suis Ahmed," a phrase proclaiming solidarity with the slain Muslim police officer who tried to stop the terrorists—an overlooked figure when you consider the widespread backlash that occurred for Muslims across the country, since the media can't seem to differentiate a few bad seeds from an entire religion).

The upshot of all of this information—it seems to be flooding out of me now that I put fingers to keyboard—is that the idea of writing this blog for the past couple of months has seemed frivolous at best, fraudulent at worst. Who am I to discuss the hijinks and hilarity of living as an American in Paris when I've never felt more like a foreigner in my life? I'm not French. I felt no loyalty to the slain cartoonists—though I certainly don't think they should have been killed—but I also think a march of 4 million people to decry a relatively minor event in the grand scheme of world politics is a little silly. World leaders who have refused to share the same conference room in the past were suddenly holding signs proclaiming "Je Suis Charlie" side-by-side as they marched down the street with millions of fellow outraged citizens. Again, I think the killings were despicable, but I think the fact that the conversation about what makes angry, marginalized people so desperate that they would commit such an act—France is notoriously terrible to its immigrants, especially if those immigrants happen to be poor—is even more troubling. Je ne suis pas Charlie. Je ne suis pas Ahmed. Je suis triste (sad).

We'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming of humorous tales from beneath the Tour Eiffel tomorrow, but for now, thank you for taking the time to read this and for being so eager to read my musings. Sometimes being an American in Paris is not all it's cracked up to be, and it would have seemed disingenuous to continue writing about my usual comings and goings as though nothing had happened. Sometimes life intervenes.