My daughter is packing for a semester in France this week. Ask me if I’m worried. A lot of people already have.
It’s a natural response to terror or disaster. Early in 2002, I attended a meeting of parents of State College Area High School orchestra and choir members who were planning to tour Europe that summer.
The 9/11 attacks were fresh in everyone’s minds. Had the world gotten too dangerous for our kids to travel? Some parents thought so.
Such fears are understandable, but not rational. A corollary to the saying that generals always fight the previous war is that we are always preparing for the most recent act of terrorism. If someone drives a rented truck full of fertilizer into a building, we monitor truck rentals and fertilizer sales. If someone hijacks a plane, we tighten security at airports.
Since resources are finite, the scene of the latest attack might be the safest place to be rather than the most dangerous.
Or how about the people who, six years ago this week, were on the flight from New York to Charlotte that made an unscheduled “landing” in the Hudson River? The last thing those passengers wanted to do after getting off that plane was get on another one, but many of them had promises to keep in Charlotte. And a plane remained not only the quickest way to get there, but the safest. So back on the horse the thrown riders got.
As for staying away from Paris post-Charlie Hebdo: The power of terrorism is that it sends a message that no place is safe. But if that’s true, staying home isn’t safe either, so we may as well go about our business.
That’s what a lot of Israelis do whenever Hamas starts lobbing rockets their way from Gaza. That’s what Londoners famously did when the German air force pummeled their city in 1940-41. Cower in a bomb shelter when you can be drinking a pint in a pub? Heavens, no.
A steely fatalism is called for: A bullet or bomb either has your name on it or it doesn’t. Either way, there’s not much you can do about it.
I’m haunted, in this regard, by a date-with-destiny car accident I heard about when I lived in California. We hear a lot about the droughts they have out there, but it’s really a feast-or-famine climate: In winter, it either doesn’t rain at all or it rains so much that the ground turns to mush, giving tree roots nothing to cling to.
During one such stretch a friend of a friend drove past a hillside at the exact moment that a tree slipped its moorings. It crashed through her windshield and killed her instantly.
You couldn’t help thinking if she had been driving 5 miles per hour faster or slower, she would still be alive. Or if she had left five minutes later or earlier.
There were similar stories after 9/11 of people who, thanks to some unforeseen delay, were not at their desks at the World Trade Center when the planes came.
What can we do with this kind of knowledge other than use it to free ourselves of needless worry? For we knowest not the day nor hour.
Such thinking makes a mockery of retirement planning, doesn’t it? My dad died at 96, my mom at 89. I have an aunt who lived to a 102. So if genetics has any say in the matter I might stick around a good long while yet – in which case, I’d better sock enough money away to last a couple of decades. But wouldn’t it be a shame to defer various pleasures in the interest of building up a bigger retirement cushion, only to get hit by a runaway bus this afternoon, or by a runaway tumor a few months or years down the line?
Carpe diem, we say. Live each day as if it were your last. Easier said than done. I’m not sure what I’d do if this were my last day on Planet Earth but I can think of plenty of things I wouldn’t do: clean house, pay bills, grade papers.
Or maybe I would. There’s a school of thought that regards everyday chores as sacraments. The idea is, if we think of such activities as rituals through which we beat back chaos, we’ll take pleasure in them. More people talk of putting their affairs in order before they die than of going out in a final blaze of orgiastic self-indulgence.
So am I worried about my daughter flying off to Paris this weekend? Of course! But not because of terrorism.
Because she’s my daughter.
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