THE MARATHON BOMBER

Well, can you believe it? Rolling Stone magazine is in trouble – if having everyone talking about you and making your latest issue a collector’s item can be called “trouble” – over a cover that features a picture of the Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. It’s a common picture lifted from his Facebook page. It’s one we’ve all seen, that has “graced” the covers and pages of countless newspapers, magazines and tabloids. But, in the minds of some, the cover of Rolling Stone is different. It’s a place for the beautiful people, people celebrated for being celebrities, famous for being famous.

This controversy is a recent example of the inarticulate groupthink evident in so much social media today. A few folks see something they find troubling and fingers and thumbs spring into action. It’s a crisis, an abuse, an outrage! And what was just barely interesting , through the miracle of compound interest, has become a social phenomenon. Then the classic media report on the “outrage”. Victims are interviewed, Facebook likes are tallied, politicians wade in, and news-stands refuse to carry the offending item. Democracy in action. 

But it’s all fuzzy thinking, like the kerfuffle that arose after death of Pierre Trudeau when someone called him a “Great” Prime Minister. People who think of “great” as synonymous with “good” rushed to point out his many faults, but in a larger context “great” is merely big, as in the Great Depression, the Great War, a great tragedy. Though most of the notables featured on the cover of Rolling Stone are being celebrated, some, like those in the post office, are simply being identified. Most, like Bob Dylan and Madonna, are famous, but others, like Charles Manson (June 1970), are infamous. There’s a larger context to consider.

Well, I suppose it’s too much to expect that everyone will be able to navigate the subtleties of sober second thought, but the Mayor of Boston, the Governor of Massachusetts, a former Massachusetts senator, and the management of large retail chains should be able to handle it. Community leaders should be expected to lead in thoughtful directions, but such leadership is not rewarded in politics or business. What’s rewarded is piling on. It’s all about constituent’s votes and customers’ money.

But this is about more than a magazine cover. It’s why we have had so little serious discussion of the root causes of things like the Boston Marathon bombing. Those who ask serious questions like, who are these people, and where do they come from, are slapped down. The narrative must be preserved: these are monsters; their crazed, reptilian minds hate our way of life; they are “religious extremists” unlike us and our children.

But when we do ask the questions we generally discover that things are more understandable than we may have thought. What we do and what’s done to us are often connected. As Jesus put it, “...all who draw the sword will die by the sword.” (Matt 26:52)

There are, of course, innocent victims, like the eight year old child who simply came to watch his daddy run. All the more reason to ask the searching questions. If you’re interested check out Dirty Wars by Jeremy Scahill (the book and/or video). There are reasons why these things are happening and some of them are us.