Unfortunately, we’ve recently seen too many news reports about terrorist attacks. It has come to the point that we’re almost not surprised by the news… What's different about the news out of Paris this week is that this was not a random attack; it was a premeditated and well planned assault, on a pre determined target. These terrorists were well trained, well armed and knew exactly what they were trying to do.
How do we respond to terrorist attacks? I don’t mean politically, that’s an entirely separate discussion. We all have opinions on the matter but few of us have the influence to implement our ideas, however correct they be.
Focusing on the political side of the story is a distraction. It distracts us from responding in ways that we truly have the ability and influence to achieve.
Usually I encourage people to respond to random acts of hatred by engaging in random acts of kindness. Terrorists are aptly named because they usually aim to create terror; their goal is not about the strategic impact of their actions. They aim to strike fear in their enemies; to cause people to be afraid to live their lives normally.
And the correct way to respond to such terror is to engage in random acts of kindness.
But this week we saw a different kind of terrorist attack. It’s goal was to silence an opponent. The events this week at the Charlie Hebdo offices were targeted killings, specific people who were targeted by these terrorists.
This type of terror needs a different response. It’s not enough to increase random acts of kindness; we need to increase in planned acts of kindness.
Random acts of goodness and kindness are beautiful, they have a positive effect on all those involved. They tend to create a ripple effect of kindness, spreading the positivity to more and more people. However, they are random and unreliable, dependant on our mood or schedule or whatever else is happening in our life at the time.
We need to engage in deliberate, planned and targeted acts of goodness and kindness. We need to spend some time to think about the people in our life who could use our help. Someone struggling to get by. It could be financially, it could be emotionally; maybe they are in a strained relationship or just suffered a terrible loss. Too often we tend to find excuses why we can’t help, we’ll offer lip service to their challenges and go on with our life. After all, we have enough problems of our own to deal with.
We only came to know about this terrible attack in Paris in order to learn from it. Let’s use it as the impetus to begin to engage (or increase) in deliberate and planned acts of goodness and kindness.
May we share good news.