Wretched

Wretched.  I checked email on a break from teaching.  A friend, who’d written just this morning wrote again and asked now, if I was “OK.”  I wrote something back, breezily, suggesting I was characteristically busy suggesting I’d have time to answer his note soon.  “Just busy, that’s all.”  He wrote me back to draw my attention to what had just happened in Nice.  He wasn’t sure if I was still in France. 

Last night I had sat down and written about how all the fears of floods and strikes and terror attacks . . . were overblown.  No attacks while I was there.  I remember feeling faintly ill at ease writing that.  My family had yet to leave.  And fortunately they did leave safely a few hours later.  And a few hours after that, in a city near where we had just all been swimming and dining, a mile’s worth of revelers ridden over by zealot fanatic behind the wheel of a truck.

Nothing gun control, or bomb sniffing dogs nor police trained and armed as soldiers could do to stop this, then.  I think of the traffic cop who pulled me over last week, or of the young soldiers I saw near the café I frequented, the machine gun toting guards at the Charles De Gaulle airport.  None of them could have stopped a truck.  They weren’t equipped to stop such a thing.  What other blunt, protean means will they think up for mass killing?  How long before a fanatic finally gets the chance to use something much more powerful?

I’m glad my family is safe.  I’m glad we missed this.  But it does increasingly feel like nowhere is safe.  Somehow I know that when something big happens here, not if, but when, we will have an even more terrible overreaction than the one that the U.S. is guilty of.  Poor France is really being battered now.