We're all going through our usual expressions of sympathy and solidarity to the terrorism victims in Paris.
I'm not disparaging that. Paris needs all the support it can get. They need to know the world is behind them.
I'm just despairing because we've done this sad song and dance so often I've lost count. And we will do it again.
The thing about fundamentalists of any stripe is this: They lack the intellectual firepower that most of us have to live in a world in which people differ from the rest of us. So they use actual, physical firepower to demand everyone adhere to the same crude simplistic beliefs they have.
That's why 129 or so people in Paris were executed yesterday for the "crime" of attending a rock concert, or going to a soccer game, or stopping by the tavern for a glass of wine.
The Atlantic lists additional crimes we are guilty of that Islamic terrorists think should be punished by death. Such as going to a bar in Bali, watching the Boston Marathon or going to work in New York City.
Obviously, nobody knows how to stop people with this hideous mindset. There's plenty of noisy talk and yelling over what to do. We either ISIS bomb them too much or not enough. We're either too nice or not nice enough to refugees fleeing the ISIS-polluted Middle East. We're too Islamophobic or not Islamophobic enough.
Our world leaders' understandable inability to quash ISIS and their ilk means we're going to go through tragedies like Paris again and again, just like we saw in New York, London, Bali, Turkey and a whole bunch of other places.
There was probably a method to the madness of the Paris attacks, as there always is. The conventional wisdom, which I buy, is that ISIS wanted to provoke a backlash. More bombing, a big clampdown on refugees, discrimination against Muslims.
That way, they can say claim they are right, the West really wants to get rid of Muslims. It's a vicious cycle.
ISIS, in their fake flowery language, said they were killing western people, people of loose morals, prostitutes as they called the innocent Parisians. Again, because everybody is supposedly expected to be just like the fundamentalists, because their heads explode when people act with freedom and independent thought, and don't adhere to their gloomy, prison like mindset.
Religion through the centuries has done a lot of good in the world. But from the most hard core, rigid fundamentalists, their religion has brought us nothing but suffering, death, oppression and hate. Amazing how much damage a small minority of lunatics can cause.
It's been going on for thousands of years in one form or another, so I'm pessimistic about ever stopping it.
All we can do is defiantly put our freedoms, our intellectual skills, our social liberalism, our independent thought, our quest for peace and our desire for a full and wide ranging life front and center. Especially when something like this happens.
I do like how people initially reacted to the latest terrorist attack in France. When police evacuated the soccer stadium, departing fans spontaneously started singing the French National Anthem. Across the world, governments lit up famous landmarks with the red, white and blue colors of the French flag, a nice symbol of solidarity with Paris combined with a perfect "fuck you" gesture toward ISIS.
Near the nightclub where the worst of the Paris violence happened, a musician named Davide Martello pulled a portable piano on his bike, set it up amid a scrum of reporters and onlookers, and played John Lennon's "Imagine," that famous ode to peace and tolerance and fairness.
"Imagine" won't change any minds among ISIS, but it is a reminder of what the rest of us need to strive toward.
No, scumbags like the ISIS idiots aren't going away anytime soon. But neither will the world's majority of people who only want to live their lives, as fully and freely as possible.
This desire is the ultimate and best way to torture the fundamentalists we detest.
I'll let you go with the video of Martello playing "Imagine" on that Paris street yesterday:
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