The attacks on Paris took a lot out of me. I was at Chess Club that night & had met with two students that wanted to talk about my involvement in mathematics and chess and whether or not I was going into industry or academic. I fell asleep from exhaustion in my bathtub that night after all of the safety awareness and communications we had for shutting down air travel over the attacks.
Being President of an Aviation Club & Space Society at my school, I am mortified at the attacks on Brussels being taken out at the airport. I kept up with the Paris Attacks because we had students from two schools that I am apart of the community, enrolled in, or have a history with, was coming through my newsfeed, & we did not know who was overseas, they needed to be located.
I gather the same sentiments that being in space and viewing the Earth you would have a sense of well-being that there are not borders keeping people away from connecting, however, I also do care about the safety and security and well being of people, diseases, as we had an Ebola incident in Dallas, outbreak of anything including addiction that the CDC normally asks doctors to lower their prescriptions for opioids, methamphetamines for which I have also had to deal with people who have manufactured illegal substances such as these which to me are the same compounds in some cases depending on their recipes have the same if not similar ingredients for making explosions, so I would consider people being in a chemical environment like that on the streets to be inducting themselves in cancerous materials and polluting the earth at the same time, even when they use a fume hood at home to cook up speed. Terror is the same way, you should not give into fear when your country is being attacked, because it spreads.
I feel that had there not been attacks on Paris, I would not have mourned for people that I did not even know, 130 of them, & I would have done better on some of my tests. My world stopped during 9/11 and the attacks on the World Trade Center. I did not know what to do. These attacks more or less brought back some of those memories.
Another thing about the New York World Trade Center 9/11 attacks is that we had airplanes involved and civilians attacking in the capacity to take over the aircraft from terrorists. Brussels is the neighbor of Paris. I told myself that no terrorist on this planet would ruin me going to visit Paris and see it for all of it's allure, prestige, Louve, wineries, fashion, mathematics such as the French mathematicians Descartes, Fourier, Fermat, Lagrange, Sophie Germain, Poisson, Lacroix, Emilie Le Tonnelier De Breteuil marquise du Chatelet (translation and commentary on Isaac Newton), you know if they have a school or a library I can visit that hosts any books that would pertain to any of the subjects I would find intriguing, Paris is a direct in-bed-with love affair for the life of New York. New York and Paris are synonymous with being international trading posts and points of travel for major airlines.
I have a framed poster that says Birthday Girls for 1776 & 1789. It has France girl taking it's flag from the Statue of Liberty, who is also a girl. The Statue of Liberty was gifted to America by the French and is a symbol of peace.
I have had men ask me before if I think they are terrorists, mainly anti-social personality anxiety guys who are doing drugs and don't want to talk to me when they are sober, & it concerns me that we have so much glorified violence to begin with on the airwaves and in the media that it becomes numbing to watch on screen but alarming to respond to and react to when it is in real life, that the national stage or the world stage leaves ground for suicide bombers to invoke innocent masses of people throughout our planet in a state of unknown origin of panic.
It does not win wars to declare war on everyone who is different from you. Extremists no matter what religion will attempt to invoke fear for dominance. Dominance by fear is a temporary state that lacks a real sense of control because the extremist only feels the need to invoke fear because they feel out of control & can only be satisfied by exerting terror on innocent people. Fear is not respect. I think I have only heard one schmuck in the past 15 years say something as stupid as "Fear is Love", which is something I would have remembered from a low-life like child kidnappers.
We live in a post-9/11 era where security matters but we don't live in a paranoid state where everything is a security issue, so we do not trade in our privacy at the expense of feeling free because we have to give up our rights.
Terrorism does not come with the same set of rights. It is not like committing a crime where I may want to kidnap a man or group of them who did the same to young girls and work on their brain and fix them because they angered me damaging other people's lives. Terrorism from suicide bombing specifically, is a cowardly act of self-righteous behavior misinterpreted from transliteration of religious texts that by the way do not say "hey go bomb yourself and a group of people and you will enter"- these are calculated hate groups that are organizing hatred in their followers and using them to carry out these acts or they would have blown themselves up without involving people.
I feel like revolutions for countries who want to have democracy is a very sensitive topic that encompasses things from the Arab Spring to the Free the North Korean People campaigns. I value freedom of speech, even when I am getting attacked to the point of being harassed online & I have cried my eyes out for someone gossiping about me, I actually think well I might actually be the only woman with her clothes on with that site, maybe they just need encouragement or a role model. People in communist and terrorist driven countries do not have the same set of standards or rights. I do not think terrorists have any rights what so ever. Not terrorists who hijacked planes towards our pentagon, not terrorists who set off bombs in Paris or Brussels, and certainly not extreme militants who think they can take over countries by kidnapping girls at schools no matter where they are trying to get their education.
The International Space University is in France.