What does it mean that as time goes by, terror attacks happen in more and more places I've personally been?
Is it merely a function of age and life experience - that I've simply been to more places, period?
Is it that my travel patterns tend to be concentrated in an area of the world where these things are happening more frequently?
I think it's mostly the first issue, compounded by the second. Regardless, it's frightening.
I wrote in 2012 after seeing some civil war violence in our old neighborhood in Damascus on the news that "nobody should be able to watch a video of something like that happening and be able to say, 'I lived there. I shopped there.'" Even though these horrible things that happen in Turkey or Egypt or Syria are NOT about us - they're not about us travelers with our golden US passports that are our forever get-out-of-jail-free pass out of war-torn countries. (Except, of course, when we visitors are among the dead.) It's human nature to connect what we see on the news to what we have experienced. To say, "I've been there." To realize that, no matter how unlikely the odds, that could have been me.
Is this at the heart of what kind of violence distresses us and what kind we are mostly numb to? Is all it takes having been there, and then we feel it more? I wonder.
