After the tragedy, the question
For a long post-tragic moment, the collective breath is held.
In lieu of real developments, cable channels loop the smoky, red-spattered videos of Boylston Street as the planet’s latest sliver of hell. The threshing machine that is your Twitter feed is devoid of grain but whirls wildly nonetheless. Steve Stockman calls out Wolf Blitzer for something he didn’t say about the tea party. The particularly moronic immediately express the conviction that the whole thing is another government hoax, just like Sandy Hook and 9/11. There’s endless talk of “tough, resilient’’ Boston.
Taegan Goddard at Political Wire tweets accurately, “Turn off the TV. Nobody knows much of anything yet and they will just make you crazy.” But of course, Twitter is the same.
Dark allusions to paranoid interpretations of “Tax Day’’ and “Patriot Day’’ are scuffled about. Drudge hammers the 20-year-old Saudi detainee over and over, and some troll known only for his odious and calculated form of bigotry, wants to kill all Muslims. One responds pungently, “There are more than a billion of us, you asshole.”
Everywhere, the indrawn breath, the waiting to shout, once The Question has been answered: Foreign or domestic? Atta or McVeigh? Al-Qaeda dupe or made-in-the-U.S.A. zealot?
We run through the catalogue of those in the world who have shown both the passion and the moral vacancy to commit horrors like this, and wonder which side of the ledger will claim this killer of innocents, this slaughterer of an 8-year-old boy running to congratulate his father.
What are the policy implications of this April footrace turned tragic and surreal? How many lives will be forfeited in response?
If it’s al-Qaeda, will we ramp up the war machine again? Will haters attack cab drivers and mosques again? If it’s “domestic terrorism,” will we overreact and create more violent bigots in the process?
Whatever else happens, the answer to The Question will certainly bring the social-media chatter, the recrimination index, back to full amplitude.
Meanwhile, 150 families grapple with the dreadful new reality of loved ones lost and wounded.
Inevitably, though, we see our streets and subway stations and parks a little differently than before, and think to ourselves: Have we reached the edge? Is this the time and place where chaos ultimately overshadows order, where civilization erupts along the fatal fault lines of ideology, and BBs and nails obscenely expelled from pressure cookers in trash cans amputate our way of life?
Looking over our shoulders, we wonder about the people next to us, even as they wonder about us, and we keep moving.