Have we become desensitized by the constant reporting of terror attacks around the world? Once there was a time on Social Media when people would change their icon to show solidarity or unity, now it’s a lazy hashtag for 5 minutes – PB/TK
Terror, Again: Attacks don’t shock and scare us like they used to. Is that good or bad? – By Yascha Mounk / June 4 2017
LONDON—I still remember how fearful and disoriented I felt back in the spring of 2013, when one of my colleagues looked up from her laptop in the middle of a seminar and said: “Apparently, there’s been some kind of explosion at the marathon.” And I still remember how completely out of the ordinary Boston seemed over the following days, as the authorities asked millions of people to shelter in place while they looked for the Tsarnaev brothers, and the city ground to a complete standstill.
What a melancholy difference a few years make.
On Saturday night, I went to see a comedy show at the Soho Theatre in the heart of London. “These days, you never know what news might break while I’m up here,” Andy Zaltzman quipped at the beginning of his act, “so I brought a laptop on stage just in case.”
A few hours later, as I left the theater’s bar with a friend, a young man came up to us, almost conspiratorially, and asked: “Have you heard?” We looked confused. “There’s been some kind of attack near London Bridge,” he explained.
This time around, my first reaction was not fear but sadness, not a sense of disorientation but rather one of resigned clarity. Even before I had looked at Twitter, even before the Guardian had started its inevitable live blog, I instinctively knew what there was to know: I knew that this must be yet another terrorist attack and that more innocent people must have been made to suffer a senseless death. And I also knew that this attack would not succeed in changing London, or in swaying the upcoming election, or in winning new converts to the murderous ideology of extremist Islamism.
Continue to slate.com article: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_good_fight/2017/06/london_attacks_and_the_normalization_of_terror.html
