Worry, disgust, hope after Boston Marathon attack

I opened Twitter on my phone during class Monday afternoon. My senioritis turned to horror when I saw reports of a terror bombing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. I didn’t absorb much of the lecture.

I felt a distinct uneasiness in the aftermath of the attack.

Unlike the 9/11 attacks, this was not a large-scale assault on high-value government and commercial targets. It was a much smaller and perhaps much more unpredictable attack on a relatively mundane event.

I find that kind of attack more terrifying in some ways. It doesn’t look like terrorism as we’ve come to know it in post-9/11 America. It looks like the terrorism that other countries experience on an agonizingly frequent basis.

It’s new, frightening and leaves us feeling incredibly vulnerable. It left me worrying not only about future attacks, but also about the civil liberties that will be at stake when we begin to discuss how to go about preventing it from happening again.

I also feel deep disgust. Obviously, most of that disgust is directed toward the people responsible for robbing athletes and bystanders of life and limb. But I reserve a little bit of disgust for the media personalities and online commentators who shamelessly politicize and speculate about the attack.

CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen suggested the culprits could be “right-wing extremists,” and MSNBC host Chris Matthews suggested a similar connection due to April 15 being Tax Day.

At the same time, conservative news columnist Erik Rush tweeted that Muslims are “evil” and that we should “kill them all.”

In fairness, Rush claimed that he was being sarcastic. But 140 characters are inadequate to express sarcasm, and a media personality should know that.

It doesn’t matter whether the speculation comes from the right or the left. It’s baseless and embarrassing. It needlessly stokes the country’s political polarization. It is perhaps only good for revealing certain political partisans’ abject lack of decorum and their willingness to shape their personal narratives of world events around the bodies of the dead.

If President Barack Obama is stumped as to the identity of the perpetrator, it should be acceptable for talking heads to admit the same.

Is it too much to ask that they not point fingers and play amateur detective? One of the worst side effects of the 24/7 news cycle and the proliferation of social media is that every tragedy tends to turn into a giant and futile game of Clue.

As I write, I don’t know who is responsible for the bombing. I don’t know why the bombing happened. I don’t know what the political shakeout of the bombing will be. I do know that Monday’s heroes were not in Congress or on television.

They were people like former New England Patriots player Joe Andruzzi, who was photographed carrying a woman to safety, and Costa Rican immigrant and peace activist Carlos Arredondo, who helped save the life of a man who had his legs blown off.

They were all of the first responders and bystanders who helped save the wounded at the finish line without knowing whether the danger had passed.

Each time a terrorist plot is executed or foiled, we are reminded the danger has never really passed. But in each incident, ordinary people act with calm heads, sound judgment and fearlessness.

I hope politicians and media figures will do the same in the coming days.

­— danoconn@indiana.edu