The repeated attacks, heavy immigration of refugees...I'm hoping for the best, but I feel like there is a powder keg here. Whether or not it is based in any fact, how this is handled and plays out is a serious concern.
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There was a lot of mess already with the current immigration crisis. Now add that attack, and like you said, it's a powder keg, except I'm afraid that this shooting may have just lit the fuse. People will be connecting those two issues. They already are, judging from things that start popping up on my Facebook feed.
I fear the overreaction coming, of both citizens and governments. I fear the Europe will split, or start a war with someone, or draconian security measures will be introduced by the government. Charlie Hebdo was symbolic. This was a real terror strike. I just hope that sanity prevails and we won't amplify the damage further.
It goes away and you realize that the equilibrium in a civil society is normalcy, and to give in to fear is to lose. Recency bias, forgetting your math/probability/statistics--you're smarter than that. Lead the way for others to keep calm and carry on.
so... As an American who is old enough to very clearly remember America both before and after the 9/11 attacks? to the extent that America is like France, I can speak some to those fears.
We did several of those things. We massively overreacted; I mean, we didn't split, but we did pick a war with a country who's people kind of looked like the people who attacked us (and another war with a country we had some evidence that they had something to do with the attack) - and yes, both wars were pretty costly in terms of money, geopolitical power and credibility, commodity prices and world stability, but it didn't break us, and it didn't spill out into a major war between industrial powers. It didn't turn into Vietnam, or even something as bad as the CCCP's experience in Afghanistan. I'm not saying it was a good experience, just that it's survivable, and not as life changing as you seem to think. This isn't a war of the 19th or 20th century between major powers. This is a 21st century asymmetrical war, and while that's still pretty bad for whoever ends up getting blamed for these attacks, it's not the end for Europe.
Yes, the security measures were very costly. Airplane travel is dramatically less convenient, which means more traffic. Lots of lost productivity. We've lost so many human-years standing in line, waiting to be groped... or driving instead of flying; that has caused who knows how many extra deaths. (re-reading this... while I logically stand by the idea that we've lost more to the security measures than to the original attacks... on an emotional level, I feel shame for saying so out loud.) Personally, my perception is that this is slowly getting better with the pre-groping of the 'tsa pre-check' or the straight up money check of the "CLEAR" program. I mean, air travel is never again going to be as easy as it was when I was 19 during my lifetime, but it's not as bad as it was when I was 22, let me tell you, and it's getting better.
But... even at it's worst? This wasn't world war two. This wasn't even the Crimean war, at least on my side of the conflict. I mean, I don't want to diminish the sacrifices of our soldiers, it's not a job I would want to do, but being deployed in the wars we engaged in after 9/11 was less dangerous than delivering pizzas, if you only count the chance of getting killed or maimed, rather than harder to quantify mental traumas associated with fighting a war (which personally, I find to be a much larger deterrent to becoming a soldier than the danger. I was... just about at prime recruiting age on September 11th, 2001.
And for the rest of us? Yeah, 9/11 was a big deal. A bigger deal than I understood it to be at the time. A much bigger deal. but... it wasn't the end of life as we know it.
That was the weird thing about my 9/11 experience. So I had a dot-com job, and my boss was watching the news on a very early live-streaming website. (I want to say it was CNN or something, but I don't remember) I was mildly annoyed with her for not working and instead subjecting me to, you know, video news.
My thoughts at the time were the opposite of yours. It did not occur to me that this was going to change my country; It took me quite some time to understand that this was hugely impactfull.
> I fear the overreaction coming, of both citizens and governments.
This is pretty much the standard official and media reaction to these kind of events. You're supposed to fear the "backlash" more than the terrorism. Yes, dear French people, this was bad, but the real catastrophe would be voting for Le Pen or ending Mid-East and African immigration.
That's what the OP probably meant. If you think about it, don't you think it is a somewhat unnatural reaction to being under attack, to always end up fearing those who didn't initiate the attack?
It is, but natural reaction is wrong. I still have much bigger chance of dying in a car accident than a terrorist attack. In general, the natural reaction to such events was fine 6000 years ago, but in today's hyperconnected, media-driven society, awareness of a danger is usually inversely proportional to the chance of it happening to you.
But I also know that general population has this natural reaction, and - as politicians follow the voice of people, instead of the voice of reason - it leads to very bad outcomes. I am afraid of those bad outcomes.
> I mean, we didn't split, but we did pick a war with a country who's people kind of looked like the people who attacked us
The problem here is that 'people who kind of look like the people who attacked us' are not foreign, they're here, in Europe. The hot topic of past months was the waves of immigration, and before that it was Islam minorities. I fear that people will retaliate on those communities and it will turn into a civil war. Or even if not, the tension between policies of various European countries RE immigration were high, and overreaction here may just be enough to split us apart.
> My thoughts at the time were the opposite of yours. It did not occur to me that this was going to change my country; It took me quite some time to understand that this was hugely impactfull.
My experiences are informed by what happened to your country over the last 14 years. I've learned that such events can be very impactful.