Before last Friday Paris seemed far away from Mandurah. Not any more.
The murder of 129 people and the wounding of 350 more drew our two distant cities closer, in ways the perpetrators of these atrocities could not imagine and did not intend.
The values they tried to tear down are ones we share.
Targets were chosen because they are symbols of the life enjoyed in Paris.
But the life lived in Paris is the life lived in Mandurah. When terrorists attacked Paris on Friday night, they attacked our culture, our society.
Those targeted at the Stade de France are not so different from the men and women who spend their weekends at Bendigo stadium watching Peel Thunder.
Those massacred at an Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan could have been any one of us who enjoy Mandurah’s live music scene.
And it was hard not to think of the hundreds of people who enjoy their evenings at the Mandurah Marina or the foreshore, when reading about the horror of gunmen opening fire on diners at Le Carillon or Le Petit Cambodge.
Those responsible want us to see these attacks and imagine ourselves and our families in the places of the victims.
We are the audience they have selected for this horror; all of us reading newspapers and watching news broadcasts or the internet.
We are the ones they wish to terrify, and that is what draws our cities together.
The world is at war, and has been since September 11, 2001.
We must now accept this fact, and accept that nowhere in the world is too distant.
All of us who share values of freedom and liberty are now closer than we once were.
