From Twitter.

I looked at this picture for a long time. Probably cutting pretty deeply into my writing. It was after I worked on my Irish lessons and before I blocked my browser in my normal two-hour increments.

I care very deeply about the right to have something published. To have ideas and dogma criticized publicly. Not just because I write, because this isn’t really my main “thing.”

And not just because I’m a spiteful Atheist full of anger toward other religions.

But because no society has gotten better because it spent too much time insisting everything is great.

Anyway, not the point.

The point is that I spent a lot of time looking at this picture of a man who died because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and he was senselessly executed because he stood between a madman and his intended targets.

I don’t know much about Ahmed Merabet. I don’t know what he thought about Charlie Hebdo. I don’t know what he thought of international terrorism or how important his Muslim faith was to him.

Maybe someone will enlighten us in time.

But what I do know is what doesn’t happen anymore.

While I was staring at this, Brigid called me over to watch a silly YouTube video. And I could.

 

 

And he can’t.