Greetings, readers out there in the future... don’t mind me, I’m still mired back here in the middle of last week, vainly trying to make some sense out of the terrorist attack on the Paris offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. By the time you read these words, you will know a lot more than I do at the moment about the eventual outcome of the situation—but I would wager that we won’t have any better ideas about what we should do in its aftermath.

The shock and anger are still fresh. “Je suis Charlie” and “nous sommes tous Charlie” are the declarations du jour on Twitter feeds and Facebook statuses across the planet, including my own. Pens are raised high in clenched fists as a gesture of solidarity with the cartoonists and other magazine personnel who lost their lives in the attack. We renew our commitment to the rights of freedom of the press and freedom of speech, even deliberately offensive speech, as signs of our supposedly more enlightened culture.

Predictably, Islamophobes and war hawks have jumped on the opportunity to declare Muslims everywhere clear and present threats to public safety, celebrity atheists have denounced all religions as sources of violence, and certain conservatives have tried to pin the blame on President Obama’s conciliatory rhetoric and his attempts to build bridges to the Muslim world.

We are urged to face a “cold, hard reality”—that the differences between us and between our cultures are implacable, and reconciliation and coexistence all but impossible.

The only “cold, hard reality,” when it gets right down to it, is that everybody dies. Beyond that, we have more flexibility than one might think—and we have choices. We can settle for a dog-eat-dog world where the only question is who has the greater strength and demonstrates the greater will to use it, or we can work to make a world that is less cruel and violent, one that is more civilized, cooperative and humane. Our choice. Some people kinda like things just the way they are, apparently. Other people have a different vision—not an illusion, a vision. We know we haven’t gotten there yet; in fact, we know how incredibly distant we are from the realization of that vision. But we have to keep focused on the possibility.

We also have to keep in mind that rights carry responsibilities, and that words and images can be weapons in and of themselves. As a sometime satirist myself, I understand what the folks at Charlie Hebdo (and “South Park,” and the “Daily Show,” and The Onion) do, and the importance of skewering the powerful and self-important. But satire’s blade is sharp, and it’s better used as a scalpel than a broadsword or a bulldozer. Merely pushing someone’s buttons to prove that you can do it, or just to get a rise out of them, doesn’t get us very far when all is said and done.