BY DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI NEWS AND COMMENTARY

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, MONDAY, NOV. 16, 2015) — In isolation, kingdoms and countries, principalities and territories can live in relative security. Protection becomes primarily an internal responsibility, as it was for the first 49 of 50 millennia of what can by a McCovey stretch be called civilization.

Once the world shrinks, however, sovereign resources and ways of life become contingent upon secure borders, skies, waters, radio waves, TV signals, and cyberspace. From the Enlightenment to tomorrow, the world has grown smaller. With the shrinkage, security points outward.

For example, the global marketplace is no longer a theoretical case study but the everyday reality of local, regional, national, and international commerce and economics. This daily movement of trillions of dollars in assets has helped create the unintended but predictable fluctuations in standards of living, access to clean water, procurement of  food, and the presence of life’s other daily minimal requirements. On a worldwide scale, some people have too much. Many more don’t have enough. A few have everything. The majority have next to nothing.

Moreover, with cheap computer technology and cyberspace conspiring to make billboards of the world’s secrets let alone its excesses, the have nots desperately and daily see a razor-sharp, pixel view of what the haves enjoy in boredom. They don’t like it.

Technology has not stopped to take into account regions such as the Middle East and Africa, where religion is superstition, society is tribal, and ethnicity tops reason and logic. These backward ways were not meant for the 21st century, proof of which can be seen in the rise of religious, legal, and moral fundamentalism. These undeveloped manners and moires do not comprehend the subtleties or speed of 21st century life. The eye is still for an eye, the tooth for the tooth. And that would be fine, or at least not the rest of the world’s problem, if not for the weaponry and tactical capabilities technology has put into the hands of the fundamentalists and other benighted primitives capable of their use but not of their discretionary use

Thus we come to the events of the weekend in Paris, France. THE PLANET doesn’t need to expound. You know the details. We will say, though, that while the attacks surprised they didn’t shock.

The terrorists have won again. They won’t have to carry out another attack anywhere for a while now, since they have the rest of the world on edge. They have shown up western civilization’s dilemma: It cannot afford nor does it want freedom.

Leave alone boarding an aircraft. You cannot enter a stadium without being frisked nor can you engage in “private” communication without the government monitoring. You can’t even enjoy a soda in peace. The computer chip in your Coke can sees to that. Are the infringements worth the cost?

THE PLANET argues that the cost, however justified it may seem, especially when the most recent attack is still so raw, outweighs the benefits. The Paris attacks demonstrate that.

The French government had in place perhaps the world’s most sophisticated security apparatus, including the full force of its own agencies as well as the Anglo/American/NATO intelligence operations. The French enacted enhanced security measures after the Charlie Hebdo incident and ahead of a U.N. Conference on Climate Change set for Nov. 30. In addition, press reports suggest that there were credible warnings ahead of this weekends attacks. France was as lock-downed as a whiff of freedom will admit, and yet the terrorists succeeded — wildly.

The attacks have given hardliners in the French government a blank check in the assault on personal freedom. The United States and Britain have followed suit. Every citizen of a “free” society is now a suspected terrorist until proven otherwise.

Terrorism is an “ism.” It’s not an army. It’s an idea. Nations cannot compete. Bullets can never defeat ideas.

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“Why does the thin grey strand / Floating up from the forgotten / Cigarette between my fingers, / Why does it trouble me?” — D.H. Lawrence, 1st stanza, “Sorrow,” (1915).

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.

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