It’s strange to me that I posted about life being hard only three days before the attacks in Paris. In my last post, I talked about things like being homesick, and then being actually sick, but while writing that post, I didn’t even consider the fact that something like the massacre at the Bataclan could happen while I was in that very neighbourhood.

Yet, three days later, with sirens blaring outside and helicopters flying overhead, I sat on my bed after a long day at Disneyland, and watched live news updates with horror as the death toll climbed higher and higher.

After the attacks, I spent a few days inside the apartment I was living in, because honestly I was way too afraid to go outside. The first time I took the metro after the attacks, my heart was beating faster than I think it ever has before, and no matter where I went in the city, I was always looking over my shoulder.

Until one day, I wasn’t. It took about a week, and then I was okay again. But I wasn’t the same. How could I be? Something of this magnitude had never happened in the same city as me, let alone the same neighbourhood.

At first, once my fear left me, I was angry, and then I was sad, and then I was angry again. I was angry how the U.S. responded to the attacks, but I was angrier that these terrorists took so many lives from innocent people and instilled fear, sadness, and loss in others. People just like me. All they wanted to do that Friday was see a football game, see their friends and enjoy a meal, or maybe even go see a band that they had only ever listened to one time.

After that night, a lot of people in my life seemed to want to assign some deeper meaning to what happened. A few weeks later on Thanksgiving, some reporter from NBC asked me if the holiday had “any special significance after the attacks”. Of course, being the nervous POS that I am, I said exactly what he wanted to hear, and talked about how thankful I was to have my friends all safe and that we should never take life for granted or something along those lines. Truth is, that was just a line of bullshit.

I wasn’t extra thankful, and I didn’t assign some special meaning to these attacks. In my mind, it was as simple as people died, and it was horrible, and I’m angry about it. In fact, just thinking about it as I write this makes me angry again, but after a little more than a month to sit and think about all of the shit that is going on in our messed up lives, I have finally found how the attacks changed me, and that being angry is good, but only to a point.

This world is crazy big. Especially the United States, in all of its gigantic glory, but when you throw people into the mix, combined with the power of the worldwide web, this world shrinks. It’s tiny. The planet itself could be considered fairly large compared to us (humans are rather small), but now that we live in a world full of jet planes, smartphones, and the internet, we have to realise that our planet is not as big as it once was.

That’s what the attacks showed me. They didn’t make me more afraid to go outside, because let’s be honest, living in the United States is more dangerous than living in basically any other developed nation (got guns?), but it made me realise how tiny and connected our entire planet is.

You may think that what happens in the Middle East doesn’t impact you because it is thousands of miles from what goes on in your everyday life. You might not even know what’s going on over there, but our politics are being influenced by what happened, and me, a person you know on some level, could have been caught up in these attacks as easily as I wasn’t.

That’s why it is so important to know what is going on and to understand what you can do about it. Fearing people of a certain religion is not going to make our world safer, and not knowing the who, what, and why of these attacks makes it possible for it to happen again. I’m not saying we all have to know every single detail, but I know that I definitely was not paying enough attention to our world before this all went down in the city I was living in.

These attacks made me angry, but they also made me realise that getting angry won’t solve anything. Telling people the facts about why this happened, and using our compassion to find common ground with other humans is how we solve problems. Nobody wants to live in fear, whether it’s from terrorism, a mean neighbour, or the government. Of course, anger can fuel us to act, but it isn’t the answer. The solution is to gain knowledge, and to use it to support each other in our quest to stop these horrific acts of murder and unnecessary violence.

Terrorism is designed to breed hatred, and it is designed to strike fear into your heart, but if you fight terrorism with knowledge, and get a grip on what is going on in the world around you, the terrorists won’t win. Because knowledge is power, and violence is not.