Age of the Geek

To The Future and Back

I’ve been doing this for a long time now and it still sometimes surprises me when I discover that people actually read what I write.

     It shouldn’t. Intellectually I understand that far more people have read my work than I will ever be aware of. After all, newspapers wouldn’t exist if nobody was reading them. But there’s still that bit of cognitive dissonance that occasionally catches me off guard when somebody compliments me on a story or tells me they enjoy my column.

     So I cannot imagine what it must have been like for the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo last week when gunmen stormed their office, so offended over the cartoons that the magazine produced that the gunmen were willing to kill over them.

     The magazine, which had previously been bombed in a similar attack, lived in a world where printing offensive cartoons placed them in mortal danger.

     That reality is so far removed from my own that such an attack doesn’t seem possible. If I were writing an action movie, I wouldn’t even consider such a scenario because the idea of terrorists gunning down cartoonists is just that unbelievable.

     And yet, here we are. Welcome to 2015.

     We are now officially living in the future. This is the year we’ve been waiting for since “Back to the Future Part II” came out in 1989.

     And how do we start it? With a couple of psychopaths convinced that we were all better off in the 15th century. Madmen so warped that the only productive thing they could think to do with their lives was murder people for making offensive cartoons of Muhammad.

     Their justification? A rule intended to keep Muhammad from being idolized.

     How do you even react to something like that?

     It would be so easy to simply blame Islam. After all, it’s been more than a decade since 9/11 and the world is still suffering from militant jihadists.

     But let’s get some perspective here. There’s nothing inherent in Islam that leads to this kind of madness.

     Yes, it was Muslims that carried out these attacks, but it was also a Muslim police officer that was killed trying to stop them and a Muslim grocery worker that hid customers in a walk-in freezer during a hostage crisis at a kosher supermarket.

     All religions have their crazy fundamentalists that can’t separate their faith from pragmatic reality. The same inane rules that lead grown men to take a rocket propelled grenade launcher to a magazine office can be found in the Bible. You don’t even need to look that hard.

     After all, a thousand years ago, it was the Arabic world that was the shining star of civility and progress. They were doing fine until a bunch of barbaric Christians spent a couple hundred years getting their crusade on.

     The story doesn’t change. Just the names of the characters.

     One might even argue that religion in general is the cause of all this suffering, but even that is too simple an answer. Religion can be a powerful tool, particularly when misused, but it’s still just a tool. If it wasn’t religion that motivated these attacks, it would have been something else.

     The chain of events that lead to last week’s terrorist activity are a complex web of political, economical, sociological and even geographical issues that ultimately led to the boiling hot mess we have now.

     It’s the result of a continually shrinking world, bumping cultures that are developmentally centuries apart.

     I don’t know what can be done to stop such a tragedy from happening again, but the millions of people rallying in France this weekend seem to be off to a good start. The world will eventually drag these loons kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Progress is inevitable.

     Charlie Hebdo will publish their next issue this week. That’s what I call a victory.

     Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and je suis Charlie.