I must admit, it feels strange writing this now. Whenever I write, no matter the topic or occasion, I always pour my entire being, my entire heart, onto the page.
However, at this moment in time I am finding what is normally commonplace to be impossible.
My entire heart is in Paris. I cannot spare any for you on this day. While the world looked on in incomprehensible horror as the events of Friday night unfolded, the body count reached ever skyward before our very eyes. I, and anyone else who has lived in the City of Lights, felt something different.
It was as though my very soul shattered somewhere deep inside. My second home, my home away from home, was bleeding, and there was nothing that I could do to save her.
Now that the dust has settled, and the dead have been counted, only one question remains: What is our response?
While this is a simple question, there is no easy answer. As I listened in the late hours of Friday night to French President François Hollande speak, when the line that separates early morning and late night became indecipherable, and when the full extent of the carnage was only beginning to become known, I heard President Hollande speak as a man whose children had just been taken from him.
He spoke as though he were a father who would soon have to bury a son. By the weight of his words, I can promise you that he will do whatever it takes to find his vengeance, and any group or nation who seeks to stand in the way of France in this time will face the wrath of God’s own thunder.
The United States may very well be forced to stand with France. Such is the nature of international treaties. When you attack one of us, you attack us all. I am fearful of this sentiment. Not because I am against it, rather because I support this in its entirety.
The Islamic State has spent years claiming that they are a caliphate, a nation just as we are, but above us as they exist fulfilling the holy crusade of jihad. If they wish to be treated as a state in the theater of war, as a nation amongst equals, then we will grant them that. They will see the full might of the West that they claim to stand against.
In their own cities they will witness what we did in Dresden and in Tokyo, to those nations who dared stand against our cause, who fooled themselves into thinking they stood a chance. We burned their world to the ground.
Yet my fear persists, because there is no logic is this thinking — no matter how much my heart wishes the opposite were true. Violence, vengeance, these things, these forces, are not enough on their own.
The war against radical Islam will not be won on the day that the last militant is killed by a Western bullet or bomb. The war against radical Islam will be won when we are victorious in our fight for the hearts and minds of the generation that will soon follow. We must stem the tide at its source. We cannot restrict ourselves to treating the symptom; the disease must be cured. We must stop the radicalization of children who know nothing but violence and hardship, who see their home being torn apart and seek to place blame.
If this is not done, if we go about our business as usual and conduct the coming fight as we conducted the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, then this war will not end with us. It will be our children’s war, and their children’s war as well.
Even still some might say that no response is needed, that we are already doing enough to combat the force that seeks to destroy us. There is folly in this thinking that is foolish to the point of farce. When faced with crisis, you must do something. If the action you take does not work, admit it readily and try again.
But above all else, you must try something.