There’s a certain awful feeling that’ll only get more familiar: waking up with a hazy head, eyes tired and straining to focus on the news alert tucked among Facebook notifications on your phone. On Tuesday morning, it read that three explosions in Brussels killed more than 30 people and injured more than 200. For the moment, that’s all it said.
Details materialized with the ensuing hours. At around 8 a.m. (3 a.m. EDT), two attackers struck the departure gates at the city’s Zaventem airport. An hour later, a third explosion hit a downtown metro station. Within hours, the United States was waking up to the sort of social media mourning not seen since the Islamic State group, who would take credit for the Brussels attack, brought similar evil on Paris last fall. In our fear and confusion, we turned to our nation’s leaders for their guidance and support.
Really, we should have known better.
As American politicians took to the Twittersphere, their responses spanned the spectrum from stern to smug to vaguely totalitarian. Both U.S. presidential frontrunners, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, called for bolstered homeland security, with Trump adding on Fox News, “I’ve been talking about this for a long time.” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, also campaigning for president, took a more sure-handed approach, calling for law enforcement to “patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.”
For the most part, though, what we heard from our government was about what we expect when acts of terrorism feel this close to us. Politicians from both parties proclaimed solidarity with our Belgian allies and called for renewed commitment to stop those who would bring harm to the West.
“The wave of terror that has been unleashed in Europe and elsewhere around the world are attacks against our very way of life and against the democratic values upon which our political systems have been built,” Ohio Gov. John Kasich, also a Republican presidential candidate, said in a statement on the attacks, as if any reasonable person could disagree with him.
Regardless of how delicately they’re handled, though, the responses given by our leaders in the wake of international tragedy are given to seeming insufficient. It’s worth pointing out that part of that comes from our country’s habit of selective grief — 35 people were killed in a similar attack in Ankara, Turkey, earlier this month, with no such outpouring of support for our Turkish allies to be found.
But there’s a more troubling reason, and not just troubling because Trump was the one to touch on it. In talking to CBS News Tuesday morning, Trump said that despite the horror of what befell the people of Brussels, “That’s peanuts compared to what’s going to happen.”
That’s an extreme sentiment, true, but if Trump’s good at anything, it’s keying into the very real fears Americans feel. After all, Brussels is the de facto seat of the European Union. With the arrest of Paris attacks perpetrator Salah Abdeslam on Friday came the revelation that, of the Europeans who left to join the Islamic State group, hundreds have returned home. With Paris and now Brussels fresh in our memory, it’s too easy to see our newsfeeds filled with the faces of friends studying abroad in London, Paris or Madrid and think, “What if?”
It’s the responsibility of those in whom we vest power — or of those asking for that power — to protect us from those fears, and the strongest chance to do so comes with the first remarks in the aftermath of tragedy.
For fear of inaction, we must be realistic. As these atrocities — God forbid — become routine, blanket statements of thoughts and prayers will become hollow. Albeit tactfully, our politicians must consider the scope of these attacks, with strong reassurance that doesn’t pull punches. For better or worse, that doesn’t seem to be a problem.
So for fear of isolation, we must fight the urge to use that strength to seal ourselves shut. By reaching out in solidarity with our ailing allies, we assure ourselves that, should we ever find ourselves facing the unthinkable, we might find their hands reaching back out to us. Security is one thing, but cordoning ourselves from the rest of the world won’t help us if, as in San Bernadino and in Boston, the next attack comes from within.
But for fear of disunity, we shouldn’t let the threat of a homegrown attack fracture our nation. Cruz’s despicable calls “to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized” — as if Muslim Americans are patiently waiting in their ghettoized neighborhoods, tearing pages from their calendars until their inevitable radicalizations — misdirects the sort of aggression he demands of us. We can decry “radical Islamic terrorism” too, until our own jowls fall off, so long as we’re not equating it with the millions of Muslims living here in peace, and so long as we don’t let the thought of Them cloud the power of Us.
As with everything, there will be a time for politics in discussing the attacks in Brussels. But until then, we should be able to count on those who lead us to do exactly that. That means taking control from the obvious thing terrorism would see control us: terror.
