The Münster incident

There was a vehicle-based attack in Germany today. It happened in the city of Münster, which is where I spent much of my childhood. I went to kindergarten and elementary school there, and my family still lives in the surrounding area, so they are in the city a lot.

You want to know a Xanax moment? Try texting your siblings after learning of a terror attack in the city where they go to school and do their weekend shopping trips. Today was a sunny day, the first really nice day of spring, and the sidewalk cafes were full. Some asshole with a box truck intentionally crashed it into one of those sidewalk cafes, killed two people, and injured thirty more (six of which are still in critical condition.)

To the dismay of some of the German right-wing party members, the attacker wasn’t a Muslim. He was a 27-year-old German with no police record, but he had a history of mental illness. So nobody gets to make much hay out of this incident–just a brain wired wrong. The perpetrator killed himself with a gun right after he had plowed into the crowd, so this was clearly a suicide that was supposed to make a statement.

I was in a bad mood for a while because I love that city. It’s a peaceful, beautiful, diverse, and vibrant place. (About ten years back, it was voted Most Livable City in the World in its size category, 250,000-750,000 people.) It’s the unofficial bicycle capital of Germany. It has 50,000 college students out of a population of 300,000. It’s a place where young and old, foreign and native-born all get along in peace. I ran the streets there when I was a kid, and it’s the city I identify as my hometown even though I was born in a village hospital about twenty miles away. It’s not a place where you’d expect the sort of senseless violence that happened today. Having to text your siblings and waiting for their responses to make sure that they weren’t there was not fun. (Turns out my sister was there earlier, but in a different part of the old city, and my sister-in-law and two of her kids were there as well, but at a birthday party for a friend. All are home safe and sound.)

But I keep looking at that picture, taken a minute or so into the incident. The first police car has just arrived on the left edge of the picture, and one of the civilians is hurrying over to them to let them know the situation. But look at the people by the van. They don’t know the background of the attack or the motivation of the driver (other than the fact that it was clearly intentional.) They don’t know if the driver is armed, or if there are explosives in the van. But before the authorities even get there, they are busy helping the injured and each other.

I have days where my view of humanity is rather dim, but stuff like this reminds me that most people are good at heart, and that events like today make the news in such spectacular fashion because they are rare aberrations. But this has been one of those days that call for a stiff drink and a nutritionally unwise dinner.