Orlando and Terrorism: A Growing Change

Normally I prefer to stay out of these kind of controversial issues. As I am neither an avid blogger nor a newsperson, I feel that I would be inadequate in sharing my thoughts on matters that plenty of others have covered. Newstations already have talked in length about this, as have other users and people online. To provide the reader an opinion would require me to go beyond what I intuitively know, but the issue is that this topic makes me think I need to explain everything and anything. For the sake of not making something super convoluted, I try to remain short in explanations of this nature.

But I still think I have a responsibility to say something.

I won't be talking about the issue about guns, nor Muslims, nor gays, nor anything that most others have been talking about. I only wish to explore a rather interesting topic.

Terrorism.

The concept isn't a new one. To be sure, the Boston Tea Party was technically an act of terror. The Guy Fawkes conflict was also an act of terror. Terrorism as a whole isn't a modern issue; it's an evolving one. The term wasn't even invented until the late 1700s, and even then (as historytoday.com points out) it meant "a legitimate system of government which used terror to assert itself."

I don't understand terrorism. I just don't. To me, it doesn't make sense. It's not war, nor is it a brief battle. Fear is a strong emotion, certainly, but it's not effective enough to cripple a populace. If you want to completely destroy the morale of the enemy army, fear can be used, but you also need superior tactics, killer instinct, and a willingness to utterly decimate their forces. That's how winning in war works.

Though, to compare terrorism to war is an odd analogy. War has no winners; only the dead, and survivors. Terrorism has no winners either, because either way you become a target and will die eventually by enemy hands. Yet war has a more definite limit to it. There's an end when the other sorry bastard is either completely dead or otherwise incapacitated. Afterwards, you divide the spoils among yourself and any allies, and call it a day. At least until the next war starts.

Terrorism has no definitive end, nor really a definitive beginning. A good example of this being a late realization is the awful War on Terror that got nothing worthwhile done. All it caused was more death and a confused public. (You could argue that it resulted in Osama Bin Laden's death, but, once again, a terrorist is permanently on a kill list once they are identified. It's almost needless.)

The point of the manner is that terrorism doesn't work. At best, it makes the victim scared for their lives, but at the same time, it causes the surrounding others—affected or not—to become angered and violent. This creates a sense of unity against terrorism. And terrorism seeks to destroy the bonds between people; yet, seen in examples of 9/11, and more recently Paris and Belgium, all it has done thus far has unified the people against them.

Essentially, terrorists create their own enemies. And in doing so, they cannot win nor lose. It's a stalemate, because as terrorism has no end, so too has it no victory in sight. It only somewhat fades away.

But the Orlando shooting has made me give pause to this realization. It's odd. The situation here closely resembles that of the above examples. Why shouldn't it be the same conclusion?

This is because the threat has evolved. Terrorism has tipped the scales. It's doing something it shouldn't be able to do.

It's winning.

It has separated people on guns, on Muslims, on immigrants, on laws, on restrictions. It has broken the American people into weary citizens in an awful situation. No longer are people so much as scared as they are tired. They want an easy way out, and thus choose to argue for or against certain issues (ex: guns). A divide is growing between neighbor and neighbor. A canyon grows as the river of mistrust and exhaustion erodes its rocky foundations. Will not the boulder of society collapse, then, once all of the support is gone?

Terrorism is succeeding because the people of this world are letting it. It has subverted society and integrated itself as a dark "norm." It has, in a clandestine manner, used subtlety as a means of warfare. Each hit is so random that people fear for the next. Each blow given is an acceptable loss. For they know that this is a slow path. More than a path, it is a very brilliant War of Attrition.

In the past, terrorism was a rather simple issue to explain. But now, it no longer is. It's changed and evolved; and we as a society have been unable to evolve quick enough to deal with it.

Terrorism now knows the meaning of fear. Terrorism now knows how to use that meaning as a weapon of huge societal destruction. Terrorism is winning, and I am beginning to tremble in trepidation, because we no longer are we on a balanced scale. If these issues continue, and if terrorism continues to grow and evolve, then the logical conclusion is that we will either stubbornly hold on, or collapse under our own anger.

I hate to be a bummer, but given the situation and potential situations, there is no easy way out of this, like the people may think. We'll have to deal with this growing threat in some new way. Some better way. Some way to turn this battle against them.