And In Other News

In a week where a lot of things have happened, the Boston Marathon Bombings have captured the public's eye - with no small measure of help from the 24x7 news media.  A lot has been written about it already without me adding to the stir.  What I do want to comment on is how conveniently we shroud ourselves in ignorance against violence in some cases, and storm with rage in some cases.  We very subjectively choose to react to tragedy.

The Boston bomb is not the first explosion in the world this year, month, week, or even day, so why has it occupied every news station for the past two days?  Not only do we still not know much about it, the news has served no other purpose than to precipitate a plethora of speculation, fear, and hate mongering.  Yes, this was the first attack on US soil since 9/11, more than a decade ago.  I understand.  It's not a question of sympathy or condolence, please, weep; but also weep for the thousands of soldiers, civilians, women, children being torn apart in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and about another hundred places in the world.  By the US's own maxim of every life is sacred, it seems ironic, that a Boston life is worth more than others...  

I can barely write or put thoughts on paper, so I will let Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian UK do it for me. 

It appears that we find it acceptable when there is death and destruction in a setting of predisposed violence (read: war).  The US government changed the status of people arrested under the Patriot Act and shipped off to Gitmo as "enemy combatants" to create the aura of war (and of course to circumvent the Geneva Convention).  When injustice and violence takes place in an act of war, it becomes perfectly acceptable to us, or rather we don't even discern it as death, but as a natural sequence of events in a war zone.  At some primal level we know that violence in some cases is not only perfectly acceptable, it is a necessity.  For all our iPhones and spaceships, we are essentially still primitive when it comes to our basic instincts.  Fifty thousand year old habits can hardly be erased by a hundred years of technological progress.  

And there is also the head in the sand attitude with violence we feel righteous.  As Greenwald writes, booby trapping bodies is evil, but drone attacks and deliberate targeting of civilian populations[1] are, well, necessary - we are fighting terrorism after all.  Where is the outrage there?  

[1] When Julian Assange first hacked into US MILNET in 1989, a part of the evidence he uncovered was that the attack on civilian centers were a strategic military target approved by the US government.  Not much has changed in the Second Gulf War.