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The School - C.J. Chivers for Esquire →
On the first day of school in 2004, a Chechen terrorist group struck the Russian town of Beslan. Targeting children, they took more than eleven hundred hostages. The attack represented a horrifying innovation in human brutality. Here, an extraordinary accounting of the experience of terror in the age of terrorism.
This took me more than an hour to read, moved me to tears and nearly caused me to be physically sick. The descriptions are graphic, terrifying, and unbelievably intense - if you can’t handle that, don’t read it. For those who can, this is yet another reminder of what one human can do to another when they are blinded by their emotions, religon, or a charismatic leader who offers them a voice to follow into unspeakable sins.
Lately, I have been rocking back and forth between the greatest amount of hope I’ve ever felt, to a nearly paralyzing fear for the future of the world, and my daughter’s place in it. I don’t know what the solution is. If there is a solution at all.
I’m not quite sure what to do with all of that.
