"Perhaps there is a happy medium somewhere between bitter division and blasé complacency."

Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal,

I was traveling this week for work, in Europe.

When we arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, passport control was closed down. Many hundreds of people milled about confusedly. An airline worker said two unattended bags had been found and security personnel were on the scene. Officials might have to explode the bags where they are. Will there be any warning? Yes, I was told, they’ll tell us before and we’ll hear it. Does this sort of thing happen often? “A few times a day,” an attendant said.

There was no air of alarm, and everyone around us was pleasant. After 35 minutes passport control opened, without an explosion. The attitude was that this was par for the course, just another day at the office.

Two hours after I got to my hotel, word came of a terror attack three blocks away, on the Champs Élysées. I asked the woman at the desk for directions and she said, in low and measured terms, “I’m sorry madame, there has been a terrorist occurrence. You should not go there.” I said, “Yes, I’d like to go see it.” She brightened: “In that case, go left, left, then final left!”

...My editor discerns this theme: Perhaps there is a happy medium somewhere between bitter division and blasé complacency.

Read more here.