Thanksgiving for Paris

I've been struggling with this blog. It's Thanksgiving this week, which is my favorite holiday. (Stuffing my face full of gravy-soaked foods? Yes, please!) Most years, I would say that writing a blog about all I am thankful for would be cheesy. This year, I'm making an exception.

I'm thankful I woke up this morning, in my warm bed next to my husband, with my son in his room practicing standing in his crib.

I'm thankful I got to pour myself a cup of coffee and write this post because I know so many others in the world have not had such easy mornings.

As many of you are aware, I have a degree in French. As many of you are also aware, I can't speak French, so don't ask me to. Anyway, in college I had a contemporary French history class where a huge portion of the grade was to do a research paper. We had the entire quarter to work on this paper, so naturally I wrote mine the night before it was due. I chose to write it on the status of the Muslim community in France. I chose that topic because it had the most articles that were readily available. I surprisingly got a good grade on it, but I sadly don't remember much about what I wrote. I wish I did. I wish I had spent more time on it. I spent so much of college thinking that this stuff would never be useful later on in life, but that one was. And I failed. Not in the grade sense, but in the learning sense.

I failed because I had an opportunity to really study the dynamics that the people in France are actually experiencing. We so barely scratch the surface with our headline-grabbing instant-gratification media consumption. We get our "news" from internet memes and propaganda machines, and it can be so easy to forget that these are people, people who wake up every day and mostly just want to be surrounded by their loved ones and eat a good breakfast. It's people like that who were killed in the Paris and the Beirut attacks. And it's people like that who are fleeing Syria. And it's people like that who are turning away the refugees out of fear for their loved ones.

I failed because I looked at that paper as an assignment to get done, and not as an opportunity to really understand a situation in our world that was once so easy for me to ignore. Many people shared articles on Facebook calling out the fact that everyone focused so much on Paris and not on Beirut. That's fair. We should have focused on both. I think the reason everyone focused on Paris so much is because of how close to home it hit us. I was a French major and spent a summer there. This was a place I had a personal connection to. And it was a place, in my mind, that was supposed to be safe.

There's this small corner of my mind where I store the knowledge and awareness of the atrocities that are happening regularly in our world, outside of the comforts of the "safe" western countries. I think about it and I think "that's so sad", but I don't really let myself feel it. If I feel it, I have to accept how awful it is, and I'm not sure if I can handle that. It's so much easier to stay safe over here and not really comprehend that what's happening over there is happening to people. Real people.

People who want to wake up every morning surrounded by their loved ones.

I don't have a solution for this. I wish I did. I wish someone did.

So this Thanksgiving, I am also thankful for love and for compassion. I am remembering two golden rules: love your neighbor, and treat others how you would like to be treated.

Because in this global community, everyone is our neighbor. I need to remember that.