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Remembering Beslan
by LDRNY Coordinator Mikki Baloy
I was watching the news with my boyfriend the other night. All of the stories seemed to involve death, horror, and cruelty. That day, too, I’d read an article in the NY Times about the anniversary of the Beslan terrorist attacks. “I’m horrified by everything,” I told him. “That’s good,” he replied. That one statement stayed with me.
Working in disaster response and just being a New Yorker, sometimes I wish I could replace all the anxiety and fear of these times with some palliative common sense. I wish there could be a city-wide respite from bag searches, orange alerts, police drills, and news of war, a nation-wide vacation to a place where no one talks about politics or terrorism. We are inundated with images and stories of violence to such an extent that it seems our only reaction can be numbness, tacit acceptance that that’s just the way it is. Inhumanity seems to encroach from everywhere, and I want to run from it towards something simpler and less intense.
September 1 marks the first anniversary of the three-day siege on a school in Beslan, Russia. 32 terrorists overtook the school on the first day of classes, and refused to free their 1200 hostages despite the heavy artillery stationed outside. They demanded the removal of Russian forces from Chechnya. The complete story of that day is elusive, as witness accounts are incongruous and differ from the official government reports. But we do know that children, and their teachers and parents, suffered dehydration, hunger, and stifling heat as they were surrounded by masked men with machine guns and bombs. There were several explosions, a fire and roof collapse, and bursts of gunfire. In the end, 331 people, 186 of them children, were killed between September 1 and 3. About 700 others were wounded.
I remember crying while watching news reports of this last year. It was so entirely
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Russian memorial for Beslan victims
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senseless, so breathtakingly awful. I was torn between changing the channel and really being present in the pain I was feeling for the victims. What could motivate anyone to commit such acts as these? Those who survived now have the memories of this horror attached to thoughts of the first day of school. How do the children recover? There are no easy answers to my questions, just as, I’ve found, there are no easy answers when we speak of 9/11. How do we comfort those who need it most when we ourselves are indignant, frightened, and bereft, when we want to look away?
I want to tell the children of Beslan, the children of 9/11, the children all over the world who have seen terror, that it is only the tiniest minority of people who would inflict this pain on another human being. The rest of us, when we allow it, are heartsick and filled with compassion. Our compassion for each other is the mark of our humanity, and our humanity can save and heal us.
I considered what my boyfriend said about my sadness-- “That’s good”—and I started to understand. It’s better to feel the fear and grief than to be desensitized. Empathy can motivate us to greater tolerance, openness, and forgiveness. And those things are a respite in themselves.
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