le 14
novembre 2015
It was ten months ago that I wrote about
freedom of speech, of words, of the privilege of pens, and of those were
killed, in some ways, for that. #Je Suis Charlie. Today, yesterday, it’s
freedom of assembly. A concert (could “death metal” become more ironic?). A
soccer game. Restaurants. Freedom of movement, of passage. The borders are close
to closed. Famously, in the 1830s (as also depicted in Les Misérables), Paris was barricaded, fighting from the inside.
Seventy years ago, there was the Maginot line, there was “Free France” and my
grandparents fighting in the Resistance, there was my old favorite movie, La Grande Vadrouille, with the propeller
plane landing just over an invisible frontier and then escaping back to
England.
I still don’t know how much we should take
for granted. There is a UN declaration. But not even every country is counted
in that.
I commented to a friend that this—ISIS, all
of it—is like a terrible, blockbuster movie for July 4 weekend. Except I don’t
know who the hero is. There isn’t one. In another friend’s village in Cameroon,
he discovered that people believed that in action movies, those who die, die.
Ebola was that. I have trouble truly conceiving of so much destruction I have
not experienced except in fiction. I know personal tragic and tragedies. I’ve
seen babies, so many babies (and so many adults) die of AIDS. And TB. And
malaria. And diarrhea. And malnutrition. And tetanus (the most banal-sounding
shot I give my patients to check off the 10-year mark) : a five-day old with
lockjaw who died because he couldn’t feed. And there was nothing else to do. I’ve
seen that. I’ve been in shantytowns. I was in Kenya six months after buildings
and people were burned in the 2007 elections. I saw the burn marks. But I’ve
never been in it.
