It seems like cartoonists are obliged to comment on the shooting at Charlie Hebdo in Paris, or, more specifically, to draw variations on pens being mightier than swords in tribute to their slain cohorts. Of course, what happened is tragic and awful and is the work of terrible, small-minded people. And, of course, reacting to any perceived offense with murder is ridiculous, horrific and evil. But I wish that every terrible thing that happened in the western world didnt have to elicit such an us versus them response. Free speech vs. ideological tyranny! Socially conscious satire vs. religious zealotry! Heroes vs. villains! Suddenly an army of armchair activists are tweeting and posting Je suis Charlie Hebdo, and most of them wont give a rats ass about this topic next week. Opponents of Islam have been given another bullet in the argument that Muslims are violent and supremacist and too many people seem too content characterizing the millions of diverse followers of a world-wide religion by the acts of a handful of people behaving in the worst possible manner. Beyond that, some people are using the attack to characterize religion itself as malicious and cruel, as a wholly antiquated, backwards philosophy that leads to nothing less than warfare on the intelligent and the enlightened. The western world is incensed by the idea of their precious freedom being trampled by terrorists even as, all over the world, atrocities of imprisonment, abuse, torture and death are being enacted on the powerless who are desperately fighting for their own small freedoms and dignity in places where freedoms and dignity are afforded no protection. There are people heroically battling agencies of oppression and degradation in ways that carry much more innate risk and potentially reward much larger victories than even the best intended social commentary or biting satire could ever fear or hope. The media, the west, non-Muslims, non-believers: we all lionize the fallen members of our ranks, canonizing them before the bodies are even cold, but being victimized is not, by itself, heroic. Many have raised these cartoonists up, now, as martyrs in a way that isnt much different than their fundamentalist opponents do to those who kill themselves for their misguided causes. An act of unwarranted violence not unlike hundreds of others happening concurrently all over the world gets to spark a war between people that dont really need to be in opposition at all. Us versus them should just be we, the rational and varied peoples of the world, against them, the small clutches of ignorant, arbitrarily hateful, irrational supremacists that fester and fume in ways both pathetic and cruel. But we never seem content with that scope. Ultimately this is a tragedy. Its a terrible thing precipitated by the act of bigots who would take it upon themselves, unsolicited, to speak for a huge volume of people. And thats it. It doesnt have to be a treatise on the power and the danger of free speech. It doesnt have to pretend to shine a light on the violent side of religion that espouses peace. It doesnt have to be anything that pits large groups of people against other large groups of people. It can just be the work of some awful people doing an awful thing and then left at that. Theres nothing that these particular awful people want more than to narrow the minds of the world, to bring out the darkness that should be tamped down in decent people, drag it to the fore and then let it run wild so that ideologies are forced into conflict rather than allowed to coexist in peace. And they get their way. Every time we allow awful people to be the standard bearer for groups that never authorized them or elected them to be their spokespeople, bigots, zealots and supremacists win... they tease out in others what they let run rampant in themselves. I guess I dont think of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists as heroic or villainous or anything more than the unfortunate victims of terrible people. They made their ideas known, they stood up for their thoughts, they expressed themselves taking full advantage of the rights afforded to them by generations of like-minded men and women, and theres certainly something admirable in that, but their death wasnt an act of bravery or heroism... it was the undeserved consequence of running afoul of the worst kinds of people. And thats sad. Its ridiculously sad. But cant it just be sad? Does it have to be any more than that?
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 23:58:24 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015