I played video games. Specifically, I played Maple Story and Smite, in an attempt to not think about what happened. I had first read the news on the BBC news site, from a link I got on Tumblr. "That's awful" I thought. I didn't know what else to think, just...nothing. I didn't feel numb, I just felt off about the whole thing.
And then the number of victims kept climbing and climbing, until it was in the hundreds. I was already stressed from all the homework I had to do, but this gave me one hell of a pause. I started thinking about everything, about how many lives were lost for nothing. And yes, it was for nothing, because no ideology is worth killing people over.
I was a mess. I started thinking about all the lives lost, all the lives destroyed by this nonsense. I started thinking about the Islamophobia that would sweep Europe and America, thanks to these attacks. And sure enough, I was right. Refugee camps in Calais were burned down, anti Islamic rhetoric increased to levels not seen since September 11, 2001. Innocents were paying for the crimes of assholes.
Mercedes Carrera, someone I once respected, started spewing nationalistic bullshit about Syria for Syrians, blindly taking in people from another country, and so forth. I unfollowed her on Twitter for that, and anyone who thought that way too. I regret that it came to that, because I greatly admired her for her conviction, her dedication to the cause of freedom of expression, and for helping a rape victim when she needed it most. But I have limits, and Carrera crossed them. I wish her well in the future, I wish her no ill will, I respect her right to free speech, but I will support her no longer.
I watched as many of my Facebook friends changed their profile pictures to have a French flag filter. I knew the ones from Europe at least would do so. But I didn't. I didn't do it for France because I didn't do it for Kenya, Somalia, or Syria when those bastards started doing what they were doing there. I won't refer to them by any name, I refuse to. And I didn't do it for any other country because the option was never there. It felt like nobody cared until it happened to a European country. I know that's not entirely true, but that's how it felt. That's how it still feels.
All in all, however, I just felt impotent about the whole thing. The world got a whole lot darker as I kept watching what happened. I saw people whom I thought were more rational buy into the outrage and the Islamophobia, spewing that anti religious crap over and over again. I saw news outlets ignore what was happening in South Korea, the protests against the President, and how the government stifled these protests with violence. It reminded me just how powerless I am in the world, how I can't do a damn thing for anyone or anything, how all I could do was just watch as the world around me burned.
It was September 11, 2001 again, albeit on an admittedly smaller scale.
In the end, there was nothing I could do but play video games, hoping I could forget for a moment everything bad that had happened. But when the games ended, the world was still burning, and there was nothing I could do about it. And I knew it.
