The Unclad Soul

While the Paris nightmare was going on last weekend I was safe in Los Angeles with my son Caleb and my daughter-in-law Kameron and my little grandchildren Avery and Austin. It was the weekend of Avery’s 6 th birthday and we all had such a nice time together. I caught glimpses of the terrorist attack on my phone and here and there on television. Late at night before I went to sleep I would check the Internet on my phone to see the latest details. My heart was broken by the tragedies in Paris. So many people killed on a lovely Friday evening while sitting in bistros and cafes or attending a concert or the theater. I thought of how precarious life is, and how fragile. I thought of all of those who didn’t get to go home to their loved ones that night. And the many still severely wounded and hospitalized. The agony of it all, the loss, is still with me. In the meantime I was surrounded by love. Caleb and Austin picked me up from the airport Thursday and as I got into the car I hea...

Could we all possibly take a deep breath and not go insane over the terrorist brutality in Paris? Yes, it was horrific, cowardly, and barbaric. Innocent lives were murdered in cold calculating hate. But there needs to be a sense of reasonable thinking now. Not just panicked terror. That is the precise goal of terrorism: to provoke fear, frenzy, paranoia, and chaos. And when all of Europe and the Western world collapses in horror and hysteria, screams threats against Muslims, reaches for the big weapons, stirs up more hate and violence; and the decent and the thinking and the caring people of the world give into the urge for matching ruthlessness, then terrorists have truly hit their target. This is a war of ideas. You can’t kill an idea with bombs. This is a war of beliefs. You can’t annihilate a belief system with deadly arsenal. And let’s not compare this to Nazism thinking we that destroyed that idea with war. Nazism was the mastermind of one brilliantly demented man. The whole...