For Bataclan

Why Support for New Bands Shouldn’t B... What Goes Around

For Bataclan

Last Friday afternoon I sat, like many people, glued to the social media stream about Paris. The events were horrific, chaotic, tragic.

Then I read that there was a hostage situation at the Bataclan music venue, and that’s when I felt like I was going to throw up.

People at a rock show being killed by terrorists. I couldn’t just imagine what that would feel like: I could also see it, smell it, hear it. I had just posted that day about why going to see new bands play live concerts is important. In exactly the kind of setting where I am reminded and comforted, every time I go to a show, that I am part of a larger community, that there are musicians who can play a few notes or sing a few lyrics and capture an entire universal human truth, a setting where people actually pay money in order to listen to someone else for a while: the attacks at Bataclan took everything I hold dear about live music and tried to pound it into dust.

As the weekend unfolded and people expressed their #PrayersForParis, a countervailing social media narrative began to build. Where is your grief for the bombing in Beirut, or for what happened in Kenya earlier this year? Where is your grief for the Mizzou students and the #BlackLivesMatter movement, your amplification of the call across campuses for safe spaces for students?

And then, just as quickly, the winds blew the other way: how can you be bogged down in “safe spaces” (always in quotes, in this kind of usage) when real, bad things are happening in Paris? Stop complaining!

I watched the whole thing unfold and just kept thinking: all those people at the Bataclan wanted to do was listen to a rock concert. And within their intent is exactly what we should be doing now, in these days of grieving.

Listen.

Listen to each other.

I’ve been to Paris and have friends who live there so I could immediately conjure up empathy; having never been to Beirut it was harder to summon that visceral and vivid reaction. But the comments about the lack of response to the Beirut bombing made me feel guilty, and that caused me to seek out more information. I read more about the Beirut attack, particularly about Adel Termos, the 32-year old mechanic dad who tackled the second suicide bomber and sacrificed his live to save hundreds more. I sat with that scratchy feeling of discomfort, and it impelled me to research and learn and reflect on whether I was, in fact, prioritizing one kind of death over another.

Similarly, a friend made an impassioned video on Facebook over the weekend about how hurtful it felt to her, as a queer black mom living in the south, to have white friends suddenly freak out over their new perceived vulnerability for themselves and their children, when my friend and her children have always lived with that vulnerability. She wasn’t belittling her white friends. She just felt tremendous sadness that they still didn’t realize or acknowledge that she has lived her whole life with what she described as “a humming, a constant drone of pain.”

I’m a white, middle class woman. I’m exempt from that constant drone of pain. But by watching her raw, honest video, I have a better understanding of how it feels to be her. And I promise you I could make you understand what it feels like to be sending daughters out into a world where a Bloomingdales’ ad campaign makes light of date rape.

Maybe the right way to honor those poor people at the Bataclan would be a Facebook button that turns our avatars into giant ears.

Feeling bad over one thing doesn’t mean you don’t grieve another. No one forces us to make either/or choices with compassion. I think God gave us hearts big enough to hold more than one kind of pain. I think that may be exactly the purpose of those hearts, in fact – to see how wide open we can keep them. And that starts by listening to each other.

I am having a very hard time keeping my heart open wide enough to understand why ISIL fighters perpetrate such violence. I keep coming back to fantasies of revenge and retribution; right now John Oliver is my spirit animal. But my faith requires me to keep thinking it through until I come up with a better answer than that. Somewhere within that challenge is the honest acknowledgement of how Middle East policies of Western governments have helped create the terror that now follows us home.

I’m also struggling with distant relatives on Facebook who are posting anti-immigration rants – conveniently forgetting that our grandparents immigrated here, my father-in-law immigrated here, that the particular hum of American civilization comes from the energy of new ideas and new citizens and new foods and new celebrations. I’m trying so hard not to block them. I have to force myself to listen to what they’re really saying: they’re scared. That’s real, for them.

It’s exhausting and frustrating work, all that listening. I know. So I’m going somewhere tonight to remind me that I’m here as part of something way bigger than just me:

I’m going to a concert.