Isobel Hawes
I was 5 years old the day the World Trade Center fell. All I remember is being upset that my parents picked me up early from after-school day care. I sat in a chaise lounge on my patio in quiet suburban Massachusetts, blissfully oblivious, eating a Lunchables — the one with the little chips and salsa — while my parents sat inside and watched news footage of the Twin Towers falling.
Almost everyone I’ve talked to in college has similar memories of the day the world fell down. Most of us were between 4 and 8 years old when it happened. We were old enough to remember a few cursory details such as where we were, but not old enough to fully comprehend what was happening. We understood it in the simplest of terms: that what was happening was horrible and bad and scary.
I think that’s how a lot of us still see it: as black and white, good and evil. Over the past 14 years, I’ve watched the sorrow and heartbreak from these horrible attacks solidify into hate in the hearts of my generation, not just for extremists groups like al-Qaida and ISIS, but for Muslim people and Islam as a religion.
It’s the same hate I saw resurface Friday when Paris was attacked by a number of radical Islamists, killing 129 people and wounding more than 350. For every post I saw on my Facebook feed about peace for Paris, it seemed there was another condemning Muslims and Islam.
This doesn’t make sense. As rational beings, we know the actions of a few do not define the moral worth of the 1.57 billion Muslims in the world. Yet the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the U.S. has elevated every year since 2001.
When something terrible happens that shakes our sense of security, it is instinctual to want to blame something or someone — to have a concrete cause to point our fingers at and say, “This is what did it.” It gives us a sense of control in an otherwise chaotic and random world.
It’s easy to ignore any statistics that suggest otherwise, such as the fact that 94 percent of terrorist attacks from 1980 to 2005 were carried out by non-Muslims, or that as an American citizen you are much more likely to be killed by a white extremist than a Muslim one.
The more difficult and inconvenient truth is that the capacity for extreme violence does not exist as a sole trait of one race, religion or creed; it exists as a facet of humanity itself. You can find extremists in any religion. There are Buddhist monks in Myanmar who killed Muslims during 2013 riots solely because of their religion. We recognize that this doesn’t mean Buddhism is inherently violent or evil, but that this is an extremist subset of a much larger religion.
Extremism and ultimately evil do not exist as a faceless man burrowed away in some bunker in the Middle East, but it exists in our neighborhoods, in our families and in ourselves. We all contain the capacity for immeasurable goodness and unspeakable evil.
This is not an easy truth to accept, because it means admitting that monsters are not born or created but merely live inside all of us. They are dormant, waiting to feed on our apathy and indifference.
As opposed to fighting against a single race or religion, we should be fighting against extremism. When we lash out at one another, we are giving the extremists what they want. We are creating their ideal version of our world, filling it with hate and racial and religious divides. When we turn against one another, we only add to the violence and suffering of humanity.
I refuse to let my sadness from these horrible acts dissolve into senseless hate. Today I stand with Paris, but I also stand with every Muslim, Christian and person committed to a peaceful world. I stand for compassion and goodness and humanity in the face of senseless violence. I hope you will, too.
