I heard the news today, Oh boy

That’s the first line of a song by the Beatles.

I wish I had one for the twelve men and women who were murdered yesterday, in their Paris office, because they produced a magazine with jokes in it. The killers didn’t like the jokes. They didn’t like the cartoons. They shouted ‘God is great’ while they did their killing.

Three of those who died were cartoonists. The job of a cartoonist is to surprise, shock, delight and entertain; to hold up a mirror and stick it in front of leaders and shouters and haters and make us smile while making us think.

Those killers didn’t want anyone to think differently to them.

A poet called Yeats wrote this:

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

The best lack all conviction while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Nothing wrong with passion. Nothing wrong with intensity either. But when the two come together so there’s room for nothing else, no one else’s ideas but your own, and all that passionate intensity comes spilling out of the top of your head, you can become, what we call, a fanatic. Fanatics can’t smile.

Don’t forget to smile, folks.