Tragedies Big and Small

There are the immense tragedies, like the bomb attacks in Beirut and Paris...then there are the smaller-scale tragedies--like what happened to this mom in New York:

http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/a-baby-dies-at-day-care-and-a-mother-asks-why-she-had-to-leave-him-so-soon/?mtrref=parenting.blogs.nytimes.com

Both tragedies are linked to societal problems so overwhelming that we feel powerless to solve them.  And both problems have to do with people feeling threatened.  The mom felt that she would not be able to get another job if she did not keep this one; and perhaps she chose an unlicensed facility (the article does not make this clear), for financial/locational reasons.  Whatever the details of her decision are, the fact remains that she felt backed into a corner--something a lot of new moms are feeling in our economy.

We must make quality, licensed childcare available to all children under the age of 3 years old, shut down all unlicensed facilities, and make maternity leave available to mothers--at larger companies at least--until their babies are at least 6 months old.  This maternity leave could be unpaid after six weeks; a majority of moms would jump at the chance to be with their babies full-time for at least that long.

How are the terrorists backed into a corner?  I feel no sympathy for these large-scale thugs.  At the same time, we have to understand the appeal of joining the Islamic State for many young immigrant men in France and other parts of the world.  As Peter Neumann discussed on NPR today, we have to understand how isolated the immigrant communities are in France--how impoverished and distanced from mainstream French society.  Young men in these communities feel useless, rejected by French society, without a future...then they look at the "heroes" in Syria and think, why not?  Because that's what testosterone-fueled, despairing young men tend to think a lot of the time--young men without hope and without a lot of prefrontal cortex development, and with just the right amount of indoctrination.

As for the problem in Syria, we are not going to solve it simply by dropping bombs.  We will create many more jihadists if that's our only solution.  We need to know what we're going to do next if we succeed at eliminating the Islamic State as a political entity and a fighting force, because something else will pop up in its place if we don't have a really good plan (and work very closely with our Middle Eastern allies)...we've already been playing whack-a-mole in the region for decades; it doesn't work very well.