After Paris: The Importance of Follow-Through

My heart hurts for the people affected by the attacks in Paris.

I can’t even begin to organize my thoughts.

I’m not going to try to analyze the attacks or the politics behind them. I’m not going to try and turn this into some pro-gun/anti-gun thing, either, and I’m pretty disgusted by the people on both sides of that US issue who are trying to make a French massacre part of our debate.

I wonder why Paris got such a response, but Kenya didn’t. Where were the trending tweets, and the hashtags, and the buildings turned red, black, and green?

So many people are calling for peace. But will that work against an enemy who seems to want an end to Western civilization?

So many others are calling for war. Some want to turn the Middle East into a parking lot, they say, or nuke large parts of the region. “Kill them all. Let God sort them out,” some ironically say. But how does killing innocents without regard make us any better than the terrorists we’re supposedly going after?  When will the innocent Muslims have said enough?

Others suggest a more elegant, intimate approach. Boots and bayonets. War to the knife, knife to the hilt. That’s perhaps a more exact approach, resulting in fewer innocent people killed. In theory.

But what happens after? What do we do after we’ve leveled a village, or laid waste to a region, or destroyed all the mosques, or effectively closed all of our borders?

What do we do next?

Perhaps the answer to that question is more important than our immediate response. We seem to be really good at a massive immediate armed response to events like this, but really poor at the follow-through.

Any athlete will tell you that follow-through is just as important as hitting or throwing or catching. You’re not going to be nearly as effective without a smooth, practiced, and complete follow-through. You don’t stop the motion of your bat when you first contact the ball. You don’t stop the motion of your hand when you release the football or the baseball.

So even if we were somehow able to completely eradicate radical Islamists, what would we do next? What does our follow-through look like? Because if we don’t know that, we shouldn’t start the swing in the first place. That failure is part of how we got here to begin with.