🕷️TERROR

I was delirious.

Home sick, because my little brothers are gross germ harbingers and my immune system literally hates me. I had just woken up from my flu induced slumbers, to the horrors of an eight legged creature.

A spider fell from the ceiling. 

For the rest of the afternoon, I stayed alert — not daring to let my guard down. I kept my eyes on the brown, leather reading chair, where the spider supposedly landed. Kleenex in hand, I waited for it to make its move. 

…But it didn’t. 

It has been two days, and there’s still no sign of the spider. I live in a state of constant terror. My reading chair is quarantined. I check ceilings before I enter a room. I wear my chunky croc tsinelas, battle ready. 

And yet, as much as I joke about this, I am lucky. I recognize the privilege in my paranoia. I am lucky the only thing I have to “fear,” is an itsy bitsy spider crawling on me in my sleep. This fear — irrational and probably overblown — is a luxury.

Because for millions of people around the world, this kind of constant, creeping anxiety isn’t caused by a spider.

Driving Question

“Why does terrorism happen, and what are the immediate and long-term impacts?”

(Btw I’m going to try to make this brief, because it is literally my birthday and I don’t wanna write a blog post on my birthday — *gasp* shocking right? 😭) 

Going into this project, I honestly didn’t know much about terrorism. 

I mean, obviously I knew about 9/11. My childhood consisted of many “I Survived” novels — and as a 7 year old, I was certain I would have survived the Titanic (again, obviously, because I could play SOS in Morse code on recorder), but current me is not so sure. 

However, that only just proves my point. Terrorism was such a far off concept for me. It was something I read about in books, watched in documentaries.

I barely even realized how terrorism is used for a point — and that “one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.”

It stuck with me. Growing up in the aftermath of 9/11, I’ve been fed the narrative of terrorism as being black and white: bad guys with bombs hurting innocent victims. But that’s not the full story. As with most things, it’s more complicated. More human. 

As this was a quick “idea sprint,” we learned most of our information from watching, “The Age of Terror: A Survey of Modern Terrorism.“ After each video, we would separate into little groups and research a topic mentioned in the video with more depth. 

Here is the research one of my groups did: 

To make this brief…

(Again, because it is 11pm the night before my birthday — and the due date— because I procrastinated by doing line dancing with a bunch of senior citizens… long story short)

…I realized that I had a shockingly large terrorism sized gap in my historical knowledge. Which, again, is very shocking. History is so big, and I am so tired, and man those old grannies can dance.

Anyways, what I realized is that every subject my group would choose, I could literally get a PHD in just that one subject. And I was researching it in one night. That’s how vast the knowledge could feel at times. Like the Troubles, for instance, go back CENTURIES. 

I don’t know why I’m surprised, history is just like that. But for the first time, I didn’t have much background knowledge going into this subject at all and my brain hurt looking at all this vast knowledge. I guess this is the setback of a speed project. It is FAST.

ZOOM. 

Moving on, with the knowledge we learned from these speed research sessions, we were to have seminars. You know, actually talk to each other. Spooky.

We did two seminars. To make this brief, I didn’t really like how I did the first round, because I was LITERALLY SHAKING — and also, for some reason, I could not talk like a regular human being. The second seminar was much better though, and we had a very interesting conversation. 

The thing is, I actually like talking to people about deep, historical, and philosophical topics. So talking about whether or not terrorism can be justified was super fun for me, even though, as it usually goes, I end up with a scrambled brain and no good answer. 

Most of all, this project taught me that the world is definitely not one thing or the other. It’s a spectrum. Can terrorism be justified? Yes. No. But it sure is worthwhile discussing it. 

Anyways, my brain is scrambled. And before I go, I just want to mention how this project made me want to learn more about terrorism. The morality of it all really tickled my brain cells.

I watched an interesting documentary about the assassination of Bin Laden on Netflix, and I’ve also watched several videos about the war in Gaza. Looking at terrorism with an 18 year old brain (in a few hours 👀) is really fascinating. My thoughts are so much bigger now.

Ok, I am going to bed now, and when I wake up, I will be old 🙂

(This blog post started so well, and ended in shambles 💀 I personally blame the line dancing and the flu.)