Here in Boston, there was a moving and deserved outpouring of sympathy for and solidarity with Paris.
In some quarters, that sympathy expanded to empathy, because there are those here who have suffered at the hands of the same virulent ideology that left blood all over the 10th and 11th arrondissements.
Two years ago, Jane Richard lost her leg and 8-year-old brother Martin on Boylston Street to the same death cult that, using a different name, murdered Parisians who had the temerity to enjoy a Friday night out. Her brightly colored Facebook poster, saying in French what Martin had pleaded for in English — No More Hurting People. Peace — was ineffably poignant.
Others are calling for blood, and, as usual, few of them would ever deign to risk their own.
Politicians running for president on the left worried about calling radical Islam radical Islam. On the right, hawks were volunteering how willing they were to send other people’s kids to fight ISIS.
Luckily, there is an adult in the room, and on Friday, as news from Paris broke, that adult, Marine General Joe Dunford, was in a small alcove at the Seaport Hotel, just down the road from where he was born, talking to a bunch of former Marines, if there is such a thing.
Born in South Boston, raised in Quincy, Dunford has been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a little more than a month, but he has been preparing for the job all his life. He earned his nickname, Fighting Joe, on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. He earned his reputation as a thinker in the classrooms of BC High, St. Michael’s College, and the Fletcher School at Tufts.
On Friday, just hours before gunfire erupted in Paris, and before he met with a small group at the Seaport, he spoke to a big group at the Boston Semper Fidelis Society luncheon at the convention center in Southie.
He spoke about something that everyone in that room, and too few in Congress, understands, and that’s the cost of war. He spoke about the courage and sacrifice of those we send to battle, from a Marine named John Basilone who died in combat on Iwo Jima in 1945 to a Marine from Abington named Danny Vasselian who died in combat in Afghanistan two days before Christmas in 2013.
Like the best military thinkers, Dunford understands history as well as military strategy, and when he looks at what is going on in Syria, what is going on in Iraq, and what happened in Paris, he is not one to react impulsively. Reacting emotionally for those murdered in Paris is absolutely appropriate. Reacting emotionally to the murderers is absolutely counterproductive.
Besides sympathy, besides solidarity, what is needed post-Paris is perspective. Dunford has it. He is worried about ISIS, but reluctant to take their bait. At his Senate hearing last summer, Dunford ranked ISIS as the fourth most significant threat to US security, behind Russia, China, and North Korea.
He speaks of the fight against Islamists as generational, not something you can fit in the arbitrary time frames favored by politicians. He talks about underlying conditions that don’t have military solutions.
When I was a young reporter, there was a Boston police commander named Joe Dunford. He was not a big talker, not a bragger. But he was a great cop, and cops would run through the wall for him because he knew what he was doing and never asked them to do something he wouldn’t do himself.
Joe Dunford Sr., a thinking man’s cop, raised his namesake to be a thinking man’s general.
On Friday, as Paris bled, General Dunford said goodbye to his parents, Joe and Katherine, at the Seaport. Mr. and Mrs. Dunford headed down the Expressway to their modest house in the Merrymount section of Quincy. Their son headed to Logan Airport, back to Washington, where decisions should be made by those who understand the value of life and, just as importantly, the price of war.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeCullen.