The madness over the past week has taught us a number of lessons and hopefully it has adjusted some concepts about terrorism, the American spirit and just what is important to the way we live in these times, in this country.
One of the first messages should be to those who bring us the message, the media. Thos past week has shown a huge segment of the media to be undisciplined, inept and completely without integrity. It seems that the old movies about reporters racing one another to get the scoop are still unfortunately true. More important they should race to get the facts. T have a major network, CNN and then a major newspaper, The NY Post, publish pictures of supposed terrorists, only to have the truth unveiled, that neither pictured person had anything to do with the bombing is just completely unacceptable.
This clownish, frat boy concept that there is any value in one source getting a story onto the street two minutes before another has to go. Truth, not speed is what is important. Checking your sources is what’s important. Publishing facts is what is essential.
Part of the problem is that as soon as something important happens all news media immediately abandon all other issues, no matter how important or how unimportant they may be and throw all their resources into te hot item. We don’t need NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, and four or five others doing 24/7 wall to wall coverage on the same story, no matter how important it is. No story has enough aspects and enough angles to keep a dozen full time news crews busy for that kind of time. This may sound sacrilegious but there were other things going on in the world last week besides the Boston Marathon bombing.
And as if to prove my point, the commentators on all these channels spent most of their time discussing false leads, guessing on what was going on and coming to false conclusions about information that would be confirmed or denied by officials an hour after they had spent a half- hour being wrong about it. I watched one young woman on CNN talk, almost hysterically for 10 minutes about nothing. Itb was obvious that someone in charge had told her that she had to fill her air time until something broke and boy was she trying. The problem was that no information was coming in and she had nothing to base anything on but still, she heroically kept talking, not about anything, you understand, but just talking, repeating, struggling for something that would keep her from looking like a fool. She failed and so did the concept of this kind of reporting.
While the Boston bombing was going on, a fertilizer plant blew up near Waco, Texas, killing and injuring far more people than in Boston and all but destroying a town, most of America hardly heard about it because the media had already committed all its resources to Boston.
So let’s hope the media learns a lesson from this (It won’t). They could have had better, more interesting and more accurate coverage with 25% of the resources they threw at the story and that would have allowed them to acknowledge that there was actually something happening in the rest of the world, something that we would never have realized if we had watched only American TV news last week.
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There are a lot of people raving about Dzhokhar Tsanaev not getting his Miranda rights read to him, which just goes to show how little most people writing about the law actually know about it. Someone named Emily Bazelon writes in Slate, that we are putting his, and by transference, all of our civil rights in danger by this evil maneuver.
Well, Emily that’s just not so. Let’s start with the fact that this kid is in a medically induced coma so nothing that gets read to him is going to count for anything. The real deal is that they have so much evidence against this kid that they don’t have to interview him. If he manages to survive the chair, he will probably be in prison for the rest of his life even if he never opens his mouth again.
The reason they want to interrogate him has nothing to do with proving he is guilty and so the application of the Miranda law has nothing to do with that. It just isn’t relevant. What they want from this kid is background so they can figure out why this happened, how he and his brother pulled it off and if anyone else was involved.
There’s one basic fact that everyone worried about Tsanaev’s rights must understand. Nothing that he says before he is Mirandized can be used in court against him. That’s why cops are so quick to Mirandize suspects even though it sometimes gets in the way of them getting valuable information. So you can look at it from the POV that the kid’s rights aren’t being invaded, the prosecutor’s rights are. This point is inadvertently made very clear when Bazelon quotes a Dept. of Justice memo to the FBI that says; “…and the government’s interest in obtaining this intelligence outweighs the disadvantages of proceeding with unwarned interrogation.”
What the DoJ is speaking about when they refer to “disadvantages” is the fact that anything learned in that unwarned interrogation will not be admissible at trial. So why is it done? To get information that might save lives and they will worry about the conviction later.
This kid is going to spend the rest of his life in jail. What, the authorities would like to accomplish is to keep another kid like this one from setting off another bomb in another crowded place. I am more for civil rights than most of my contemporaries but you have to keep it real, this isn’t about civil rights, this is about saving lives.
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A lot of people have had a lot to say about shutting down Boston while law enforcement officers looked for the second Marathon bomber If I had been the mayor, I probably wouldn’t have closed the city but I can see why Mayor Menino did. Very simply, he was covering his ass. Doctors do the same thing when they order extra tests just to protect themselves from some patient, who should have come in earlier and now wants to sue them because his leg is rotting off.
If Menino hadn’t closed down the city and another bomb had gone off or some people in a crowd had been shot in an interchange of gunfire between Tsarnaev and the cops, he never would have heard the end of it. He would have been branded negligent, too lazy to act, too dumb to understand the danger of the situation, etc, etc. It would have gone on forever.
Other American cities have had mass murder problems and not closed down the city but that was their mayor’s decision. In all cases except maybe the snipers in Washington, it worked out okay.
But then you look at the amount of mass hysteria involved in the bombing and you begin to wonder. Three people killed a number badly injured and the whole nation is riveted. How about thirty thousand killed? That’s what we kill every year in this country through the regular use of guns, and nobody gives a shit, at least nobody in congress, certainly not enough of them to do the right thing.
Our normally useless legislators may care, but they care more about the handouts from the NRA and its lobbyists, they care more about getting elected again, than they do about the health and safety of the people who have already elected them.
While the Tsarnaev brothers were killing three people with their bombs eleven other people in various parts of the country were killed by guns. While the cops hunted Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 28 more people were killed by guns. We don’t know the names of those people but we do know the names of the Tsarnaev brothers and maybe that’s part of the problem. It’s not news that those other people were killed and it should be.
Every six weeks, in this country, we kill approximately 3,463 people with guns. That’s more than were killed in the World Trade Center and yet we build monuments to those dead. What the hell are we doing about the 3,463 that die each and every month. Don’t we care about them? The degenerate clowns in congress certainly don’t.
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The madness that surrounded this event has forced us to take another look at ourselves and our country and hopefully to get a grip on some of our false attitudes and expectations that we as individuals and collectively as a country have been holding and bickering about for a long time.
The nation has been waiting, fearfully, ever since 911, for this other shoe to drop. Sure, we have had other explosions of violence, but most of those have happened by means of guns, not explosives. Somehow there is something more basic about a bomb. It projects far more gravitas, despite the fact that the death count here was much lower than some of our not case gun killings.
It happened on a Monday and by Friday it was over. And what did it tell s? Well, for those who were there it had to be incredibly traumatic. For those who were friends or loved ones of those who were injured or killed it was a life altering tragedy. But for the rest of us, once we got over the initial shock, it was, hopefully, a lesson learned, like taking the first serious contact in a sports contest. Okay, not so terrible, we survived. We had been waiting for this hit since 2001 and here it was and we survived and in that survival we had to realize that we were going to survive whatever else came after it. Because that’s what you do.
The rest of the world has been living with this situation for a quarter of a century or longer. It’s actually a way of life in some countries and the reality is that we all die, eventually. Dying is the final event of all life and no one avoids it. What we must learn from this is that we cannot let it dictate the way we live our lives.
What happened in Boston was a traumatic event, much like a car crash or a tree falling on your house. Certainly it meant different things to different people depending on their proximity to the event, but what we cannot do is let it change the way we live our collective lives, because if we do, the perpetrators will have won. I’m speaking here, about what we give up, in order to protect ourselves from a recurrence of this event, a recurrence, which is, after all, inevitable.
Let’s face it; the world is in turmoil, much of it caused by the United States. There are a lot of people in the world who want to kill us, just like there are a lot of people in the world that we want to kill. This isn’t going to stop, no matter how much we surround ourselves with security or how many rights we give up. There are certain acts that we cannot prevent; a fact that was enumerated by almost every single security expert who spoke out, this week, in the media. Giving up any more of our civil rights in a fearful attempt to stem this flow is just giving victory to those who would seek to rob us of that which makes our nation special.
The reaction on the Boston streets was far more endemic to the American way of life. The people did not, for the most part, shrink from the explosions; rather they rushed to them, attempting to help, the shocked and injured. The reaction of the city was not one of fear, but rather one of defiance – you can’t pull that shit here.
Of course the blindingly fast conclusion brought about by he cooperation of the various law enforcement operations was cause for encouragement and even celebration. The event did not wind down into a slow, plodding investigation that months later would end in resolution. It exploded into a gun battle and an arrest so fast that it shocked many of us who are somewhat aware of the natural course of criminal investigations. The nation raised the dead body of one bomber into he air in a clenched fist and pointed to the wounded body of his brother and said, come and get us. This will be your reward.
This is not the end of terrorist acts on American soil. There will be others, some more successful and some less, but I think it is the end of a fearful period that the American people have lived through since 911, not knowing what to expect. Now we’ve seen it, now we know we can handle it. Maybe the next one will be far worse but we will handle that too because that is the nature of life in the 21st century on this planet. We are a war-like species. That hasn’t changed in thousands of years, it isn’t going to change anytime soon. People around the world have learned to live with that. We will too.
I heard a great line the other day. One friend of mine asked another friend of mine if he would give up his children’s lives in order to stay free. The answer was simple and to the point.
“I don’t want to give up anything, but yes, I will sacrifice my life and my children’s lives if it means that my grandchildren and their children remain free.”