When cities turn into battle zones
This past weekend ended with the grim news of bloody, premeditated attacks on the unsuspecting citizens of three cities — Edmonton, Las Vegas and Marseille.
We struggle to make sense of it all, to comprehend why individuals lash out at people they don’t know, and to somehow find ways to prevent such barbarous acts of urban, mass mayhem. And we grow increasingly anxious. Today, Edmonton is still reeling from a series of violent crimes that saw a city police officer stabbed and several pedestrians run down by a truck on Saturday.
While it’s fortunate no one died, this is the first time a Canadian city has experienced an attack by someone driving a motorized vehicle into a crowd — a tactic that has become depressingly common in Europe.
A suspect is in custody and officials are labelling the incidents terrorist acts.
But even as people gave thanks no lives were lost in Edmonton, they were stunned by the deadliest mass shooting in American history which occurred Sunday when a man opened fire on an open-air country music festival in Las Vegas before killing himself.
The number of dead had reached 58 by midday Monday and at least 515 people were wounded — staggering statistics that don’t begin to measure the suffering involved.
While the Islamic State claimed ties to the perpetrator of this atrocity, America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation quickly denied there was any connection with those terrorists.
As if this wasn’t already an emotional overload for one weekend, there was news from France that a man with a knife had killed two women at a train station in Marseille on Sunday before being shot dead himself by soldiers.
Though the Islamic State again claimed responsibility, French authorities are trying to determine if the killer was linked to religious extremism.
These three crimes differ in so many ways. They happened in different countries separated by great distances. The motives of the three attackers may differ, too. With investigations still underway, we don’t know if the attackers acted alone or if they had help.
What we can say definitively is that these three attacks have ratcheted up the fear and unease that, like pollution, gridlock and crowding, are becoming part of 21st century big-city life.
We can also conclude that whether the people who committed these crimes were terrorists or not they were sufficiently alienated from their communities that they could inflict such unspeakable savagery on strangers.
These are but the latest incidents of people going about their daily affairs, attending a concert or sports event, dining out, shopping, or praying at a church or mosque when they become targets.
Yes, homicide rates have fallen in much of the affluent West from what they were 20 years ago. Yet we are unconsoled — and feel vulnerable. As if participating in a new ritual, we say each time we won’t surrender to fear and that life will go on.
But it will go on with fresh angst and the nagging question: Is this the new normal?