The Boston marathon bombing shocked us to our core. With neither the degree of coordination, immense loss of human life and treasure, or national and international impact of 9/11, it held our attention in ways even tragic recent school massacres have not. The Boston marathon is a beloved sporting event, with years of tradition to its credit. Participants and onlookers were out for a day of accomplishment and fun. And in the immediate aftermath, when law enforcement was still tracking the perpetrators and trying to secure the parameters, a large urban area was put on 24-hour lockdown. The extent of community involvement in identifying the suspects, with its important use of cellphone cameras and other social media devices, also contributed to our sense of mass participation.
Quickly Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tasarnaev, 26- and 19-year-old brothers, were identified from photos showing them placing the two bombs. The FBI and local police went into full pursuit mode. We all watched what happened next, much of it in real time. TV images in endless repetition made it possible, in fact almost unavoidable, to take account of the car-jacking, the murder of the MIT policeman, the older brother’s death, and the discovery of the younger brother wounded and cowering inside a tarp-covered boat in a Watertown driveway.
A nation mourned the tragic deaths of three of the bombing victims and, in the US American spirit, began raising money for the almost 300 who had lost limbs or sustained less serious injuries. Dzhokhar Tasarnaev, still in hospital, cannot speak but is beginning to answer questions about what motivated his brother’s and his heinous act. Over the next weeks and months we can expect updates on the two young men’s histories, legal maneuverings, and most likely a death sentence for the surviving brother.
If our national response to previous acts of terrorism on our homeland is any indication, what we will not get is a conversation, the conversation we so desperately need, about what prompted this and previous terrorist attacks. A few private discussions may try to frame the real questions, but these will not gain currency in the general consciousness. Extreme patriotism will trump thoughtful insight in every public forum.
Some may ask why young Muslims from Chechnya, an area resisting Russian rather than US control, lashed out against the United States. Some will focus on Islam in general, and how that religion’s most extremist preachers are able to so profoundly influence young people with too much testosterone looking for a battle to wage. Many of those who concentrate on the religious connection will ignore the fact that Christian, Hindu, Jewish and other religious groups also have their fringe madmen. Yet others will use the Boston tragedy to try to reignite laudatory efforts toward stricter gun control, or to renew campaigns to try to limit violent video games and other such “entertainment.”
Many of these struggles are important to me. But, as I watch the endless replay of tragedy, chase and capture, I cannot help thinking we are missing the larger picture. Religious fervor often lights the fuse leading to death and destruction, just as the fear and hatred of difference has lit other fuses throughout history. But there is something else: something larger, deeper, and much more all consuming. It is the obscene and growing distance between those few who luxuriate in so much more than their share of wealth and possibility, and the vast majority of earth’s inhabitants who are forced to survive in extreme poverty, displacement, and hopelessness.
Chechnya has been at war for years. Just as Afghanistan was invaded and occupied by one major power after another, for generations. Iraq. Iran. Palestine. Syria. Sudan. Darfur. The so-called Arab Spring, its authentic local movements forced to struggle not only against homegrown dictators but to spar with powerful foreign interests. Large areas of Latin America in the 1970s and ‘80s. Vietnam before that. Northern Ireland before that.
I don’t believe the question is whether or not refugees from Chechnya should be angry with Russia instead of with the US, or why a 19-year-old described as friendly and helpful by everyone who knew him would descend into such criminal behavior. I no longer believe we can look only to immediate clues when trying to figure out why we, as a nation, are targeted by these terrorist acts. There is a larger picture, and we haven’t even scratched the surface.
I am not making excuses for the tragedy in Boston. Nothing justifies such violence. Each senseless death, every lost leg and shattered life pains me deeply. At the same time, I think it behooves us as a people to step back and begin the conversation we should have begun after 9/11. The conversation we might have begun, had we had thoughtful leadership then, rather than the playground bully stance and preemptive strike mentality President George W. Bush provided.
What I am saying is that as long as the industrialized countries reap huge profits while the poorest nations become more destitute, as long as those same industrialized nations produce more and more of the world’s greenhouse gasses while the poorest suffer the consequences (some of the smaller ones destined to disappear completely), as long as the rich everywhere get richer while the poor live shorter lives of greater suffering, and as long as the model for solving every problem is one of violence, young people like Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tasarnaev will go crazy and try to remedy their frustration through criminal acts.
We need a national conversation, indeed an international conversation, capable of making the obvious connections, linking the immediate dots, and suggesting short- and long-term solutions.
April 26, 2013