Statue of Alfred Dreyfus holding his broken sword in the entry courtyard of the
Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme, 71 rue du Temple, 3rd arrondissement, Paris
It’s true that I’ve been away from my blog for quite some
time because I’ve been working on a special issue of Dream of Italy devoted to Lago di Como and Expo Milano; but the
other reason is that I have been thinking about the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher store in Paris (which just reopened two days ago) and I have wanted
to write something but didn’t know exactly what. So I continued to think, and at one point I
thought that perhaps, over two months after the horrific attack, I didn’t need
to post any thoughts. But then I
concluded that it didn’t feel right at all to say nothing, and the passage of
time is not a reason to ignore it. As a
writer I feel compelled to acknowledge the attacks, but I also feel compelled
as a traveler to say something.
I can’t express my sorrow for all the victims and their families
better or more deeply than others who wrote and posted in the days and weeks
immediately following the tragedy, nor do I have some moving remarks expressing
my support for the staff of Charlie Hebdo (and by the way, since it seems at
least some people do not know, Hebdo is short for the word hebdomadaire, meaning weekly).
But what I can do is remind travelers about some facts of terrorism, and
share some thoughts worth pondering by writers far wiser and more eloquent than me.
I referenced an enlightening article in Condé Nast Traveler,
“Terrorism: Weighing the True Risks” (July 1996) in my book on Venice, the
Veneto, and Friuli-Venezia Giulia.
For this piece, reporters prepared a ‘Targets of Terror’ timeline from
1972 through April 1996. Some of the
attacks featured on the timeline included the following: Palestinian terrorists
kidnap and murder eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games
(September 5, 1972); two IRA bombs explode in London’s Hyde Park and Regent’s
Park (July 20, 1982); Palestinian gunmen hijack the Italian cruise ship Achille
Lauro in the Mediterranean (October 7, 1985); explosion at the World Trade
Center in New York (February 26, 1993); Palestinian terrorists bomb La Belle
nightclub in West Berlin (April 5, 1986); Arab terrorists throw a bomb from a
passing car into a crowd at the Paris department store Tati (September 17,
1986); Shining Path guerrillas detonate a car bomb in front of a Lima, Peru
hotel (May 24, 1995); and Algerian Armed Islamic Group bombs the St.-Michel
Metro station in Paris (July 25, 1995).
As is clear from these highlighted examples, terrorist attacks happen
not only on airplanes but on cruise ships, in department stores, in parks, in
nightclubs, and on public transportation – in short, anywhere, to anyone, for
reasons as random as wearing purple socks (yet another attack was one on April
18, 1996, when Islamic Group terrorists killed eighteen and wounded another
fifteen Greek tourists in Cairo, mistaking
them for Israelis). If terrorist
attacks are always within the realm of possibility, then so are the mundane
activities of our daily existence, such as walking out the front door and
picking up the morning newspaper, standing on a ladder and cleaning the leaves
out of the gutter, or carrying clothes a few blocks away to the dry cleaner –
each of which carries the risk of falling down and hitting our head on the
sidewalk or the stone steps or the fire hydrant, not to mention drunk driving
accidents, street crimes, hate crimes, heart attacks, rape, or murder. If we never leave our homes, we are
effectively living in fear; if we travel with fear, we are victims of that
fear, real or imagined, even if not a single incident occurs while we’re
away.
One of my favorite writers, Francine Prose, wrote an essay
in the travel section of The New York
Times on September 8, 2002, and in it she reminded us that “Travel alters
and expands our perspective. By showing
us that life really is different in other places, it provides a reality check
against which we can measure the misperceptions and even prejudices we may have
developed at home.” She concluded that
“The events of September 11 have – or should have – turned us not just into
patriotic Americans, but into citizens of the world. And we owe it to ourselves, and to our fellow
citizens, to go out and see for ourselves this fragile, damaged and brave new
world that, like it or not, we’ve come to inhabit.” Like a Condé
Nast Traveler reader who, after September 11th, wrote a letter
to the editor to say she believed that “Every American who travels abroad is a
bridge for peace,” I believe we are all, in a small way, promoting
international understanding by reading about other places and traveling to
them.
I remember how
surprised I was when, just after September 11th, a friend said she
wasn’t making any travel plans “until all this blows over.” It seemed so obvious to me that the world had
changed, that we were in this situation for the foreseeable future, and that
nothing was going to blow over (and my husband and I left for northern Spain
two weeks later). Certainly there have
been more incidents, enough for a new timeline, and I believe that Charlie
Hebdo was not the last.
On days when the newspaper headlines make the world seem
like a particularly nasty place, I recall that my friend Lindsay M. sent me the
following lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest on the morning of September 11,
2001, a year after the World Trade Center attack:
How beautious mankind is!
O brave new world
That has such people in’it!
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