Everything is connected. Nothing takes place in isolation. Events cascade upon each other. The world is too much with us. Everyone knows everything, right now, even if it’s wrong. Nobody knows anything. Everything is connected. Nothing takes place in isolation.
Everything is connected. Nothing takes place in isolation. Events cascade upon each other. The world is too much with us. Everyone knows everything, right now, even if it’s wrong. Nobody knows anything.
What a stunning week this country has just endured. History eventually may sort it out, but now there is only grief and dislocation.
Bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon last Monday, Patriots Day in the Hub City. By Friday, an entire American city had been locked down, an all-out manhunt was under way for a doe-eyed “sweetheart” and the perpetual unrest in the Caucasus may have crossed the ocean.
A fertilizer plant that may not have been inspected in 28 years blew up in Texas, which likes its capitalism unfettered. At least a dozen firefighters and first responders died. Government employees and volunteers. Around the nation, heroes were not in short supply. Some wore uniforms. Some wore running shorts. Some wore scrubs splattered in blood.
An Elvis impersonator allegedly sent letters laced with Ricin to the president and a U.S. senator. His family said he had mental problems. If he’d wanted to buy an AK-47 at a gun show, nobody would have checked him out.
Nor would they have anytime soon. A minority of the U.S. Senate killed expanded gun-sales background checks supported by the Senate majority and 90 percent of Americans.
Eight members of the Senate did manage to come up with an immigration reform plan that could gain passage, at least in one chamber of Congress. It contains an onerous “path to citizenship” which House Republicans may see as amnesty and which Hispanic voters may see as punitive.
On social media, it seemed anyone who’d ever been to Boston or run in a marathon felt compelled to share his feelings. President Barack Obama made an angry speech about guns and one of his elegiac post-disaster speeches in Boston. He’s had to become all too good at them.
The news media covered all of this relentlessly. Fact and rumor went head to head. Too often rumor won. Former cops, former FBI agents and former Homeland Security experts crowded TV studios, cashing in. Rudy Giuliani was there, of course. One of the experts identified Chechnya as part of the Balkans. Everyone knows everything, nobody knows anything.
Ten, 20, 30 years from now, we suspect the Senate’s gun vote will be seen as the most historically significant event of the week. The gun lobby may have overreached. The backlash has begun. Background checks for mental health and criminal records do not threaten Second Amendment rights. When the nation has reasonable gun restrictions, the Senate’s vote on Wednesday may be seen as where they started.
Similarly, the nation someday will reform its immigration laws. The inadequate proposal of the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” may be where it starts. It’s significant no state has borne a bigger share of the burden of today’s immigration policies than Arizona, and both of its Republican senators, John McCain and Jeff Flake, are in the gang. This won’t do much for Republicans’ Hispanic voter problems, but it’s a start.
By the grim calculus of sheer carnage, the West, Texas, fertilizer plant explosion was a bigger disaster than Boston: Four times as many fatalities, as least as many injuries. Texas has a long and horrible record of industrial disasters. If early reports of inadequate regulation and inspection at the West plant are correct, Congress will be complicit for gutting the budget of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Firefighters shouldn’t have to die in the name of laissez-faire capitalism.
But Boston had the optics, a terrible tragedy caught on hundreds of cameras in the midst of a civic celebration. Boston had the specter of terrorism. Boston had the drama of a manhunt and siege laid in the East Coast media heartland.
Loath though we are not to join in media specul-a-rama, but there is no way to predict its long term repercussions. Not enough is known of motive and who else might be culpable. This could be a pair of screwed-up young men unable to understand life’s complexities.
If so, we’ve seen that before, at Columbine and Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora and Newtown. It could be an act of religious terrorism, like Fort Hood, Texas; Oak Creek, Wis., or the 9/11 attacks.
Which is part of the trouble: The nation can barely keep up with the procession of horrors, much less absorb them, much less prescribe thoughtful remedies. We thus are easily led by people with money and agendas.
People in our business, the news business, must do their jobs better, lest the duty of covering tragedies become confused with infotainment.
As a nation, we must care for each other, the way the people of Boston and central Texas cared for each other. The thing is, we can’t wait for next time. We need to start right now.
