It is a day of opposites in Paris, my favorite city on Earth. Armed savages who wish to impose a world where they choose the words and images you use murdered journalists working in one of the freest presses on Earth. Barbarians who imagine the future as a 10th-century mud hut butchered writers and artists living in the epicenter of modernity. As the world connects billions of humans to share words and pictures in real time, a few terrified, insignificant lunatics tried in vain to assert that their tiny ideology should rule you on pain of death. Paris is the home of Descartes logic, Voltaires political satire, Zolas social critique, Curies science, Camus philosophy, and MC Solaars genius prose. Todays gunmen wanted to tell Parisians that somehow their goat-scented caves and stone wall scratching are superior, despite all logic and evidence. Paris is a world capital where theocracy and superstition has been replaced by secularism and skepticism. Gone are the days of the St. Bartholemews Day massacre, superceded by a culture in which all citizens of the French Republic can worship as they would like, while none are forced to express sentiments they do not feel to fit into a political system. Just a few blocks from the Charlie Hebdo massacre, at Place de la Bastille, Paris has a giant monument, not to authority figures to be worshipped, but to the brave citizens who cut their heads off. Paris is the home of civilization, of savoir vivre, of learning and art and freedom and all things sacred to people who value social progress that allows humans to transcend a past of dogma and witch-burning and intolerance. Vive Lutèce, capitale laïque de la civilisation, et à bas les Barbares!
Posted on: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 01:15:38 +0000