This might not be the most popular opinion in the donut box, but IMO this thing ain’t 9/11 or even the American Taliban guy… this is Columbine minus even the “outcast status” excuse, at least in the case of the guy they caught. From the accounts of the younger guy’s friends and wrestling teammates I am reading/seeing/hearing, these people (esp. Dzhokhar or however you spell it) were Russian-Americans, political refugees from Russia a decade ago who saw the US as a refuge and who were at first blush SUCCESSFUL here. The older brother, Mr. America Sucks and Why Don’t I Have Any American Friends?, was a state boxing champion in MA, for cryin’ out loud. The captured younger sibling — here since age 9, even with all those scary consonants in his name — was a hit on the wrestling team, by all accounts the kind of an all-American immigrant type that celebrated being here and getting his citizenship last year.
There should be no question that this kid, no matter the insanity and evil mayhem he has helped perpetrate, should be and is entitled to due process and for the rule of the full extent of the law to prevail. If he isn’t, we’re just mindless xenophobes that can’t see how our gargantuan hypocrisy is what causes people we autonomically slot in as “others” to want to slaughter us in the first place, one reason being that we demonstrate we’re willing to sell out the very thing that most makes us an alleged beacon of justice and civilization — and which forms a bedrock aspect of the Constitution that we claim to uphold as our birthright to the special status we like to assume for ourselves as a country. And which we often think is the entitling factor for us to invade “other” places and force our stuff down their throats at the barrel of a gun.
The measure of individual people or societies is not in the quantity of challenges they face or the trespasses against them, but in the quality of their responses and reactions to those challenges and trespasses. Now that this senseless and tragic week is over — and you bet the Boston area cops and federal law enforcement up there did a magnificent job under the most dire of circumstances, in the process providing (for once) a valid and inspirational reason amid the numbing horror to celebrate and wave the flag — this next period will say a lot about how we do and what we’re really about in the good old USA.
I hope we honor the memory of the victims too soon gone and the suffering of the wounded and extract — in a legal, non-provocative fashion that upholds what we allege ourselves to be as a nation — any information he may know about what his brother was up to overseas last year, and the hows and whys of how and why the fuck he let himself get sucked into this cauldron of life-destroying, megatragic madness. This, so more of a profile of what drives people to this brand of lunacy can be developed and perhaps the next week or month of catastrophic craziness can be avoided — with the next round of tragic dead and scarred victims left uncreated.
No more hurting people. Peace.