Above the Fold - Some Afterthoughts on the Aftershock of the Boston Marathon Bombings

Originally published April 20, 2013

The world felt a little different this morning when I woke up than it did yesterday, than it has all week, really.

According to news reports, the big bad wolf, "Suspect No. 2" in the Boston Marathon bombings has been taken into custody, his FBI Wanted poster updated to read 'Captured.' And the world is perceived as safe once again.

But there's been something about this whole process, something about the constant, relentless stream of confused, convoluted news coverage, that doesn't make me feel as comforted as I think Dzhokar Tsarnaev's capture was supposed to.

I started gorging on news updates yesterday morning, when I turned on NPR in my car and was informed that the better part of the entire Metropolitan area of Boston was engaged in a military state-like lockdown, with civilians being removed from or locked inside their homes until law enforcement instructed them to come out. People reported the streets of Watertown as "choked" with law enforcement personnel, marching like robots with SWAT guns up and down residential streets, determined to catch the one that got away.

Now, to begin, I was as shocked and appalled and sickened by what happened last Monday as everyone. The deaths and injuries suffered at the hands of fanatical violence was nothing short of horrifying - that there are people everywhere, even here, seemingly dedicated to harming innocent people and creating an air of chaos and fear. So catching and discovering who was responsible for this, if only to ask them why, was something I was waiting on alongside the people of Boston and the rest of this country.

But at what cost do we seek justice, and for that matter, information? From the beginning of the entire ordeal, local and national news outlets began scrambling for something, anything, to share with the general public to appease their appetite for answers. But because of this voracious hunger for blame, for a reason, the likes of the media were constantly back-peddling, correcting wrong information, recalling "persons of interests," and whiting out impetuous calls for public aid in finding the horrible, criminal, evil person that did this.

That is what has troubled me about the entire ordeal AFTER the original, awful ordeal. We are all so eager, and anxious and SCARED, that we're ready to criminalize and crucify the first person that we can match to a face on a security video. Not to mention that, in cases like these and in times like these, quality journalism is often sacrificed to the immediacy of information that comes from Twitter and Facebook and YouTube - regardless of quality. And that expansive digital exposure is conducive to nothing except, from what I've seen, a resurgence in lovely terms like, "towel head," and ignorantly, "kill that sand nigger." Practicing Muslims make up 22% of the world's population. I refuse to believe, despite what I'm being fed, that generalizing an entire group of people as fanatical, violent, and terroristic can promote any type of peace or progress.

That's not denying that social media outlets can be helpful, and sometimes even crucial, in sharing information.

But if all this information that we're being fed is fear-mongering, plagued with reactionary, retaliatory information that breeds uncertainty and anxiety, then what progress are we actually making. And at what cost? Atlanta is a long way from Boston, but I felt the fear from all those people locked in their homes, a bustling metropolis forced to become a ghost-town, trickle down the coast and make its way all the way here to me. How much has actually been done, and who has really won, if the cost of all this was the shutting down of daily life, for hours and hours; a country of people now wondering, "has terrorism finally come home?" and a 19 year old kid, in a heavily guarded hospital room, with a hole in his throat so severe that there's a good opportunity that we may never hear him say anything for himself.

I'm grateful that we may have some answers now, and I hope that we do. But this entire awful situation has me not only slightly disappointed in our aggressive need to gobble up whatever shoddy information we can get, but also in the future role that accurate news reporting will play in our lives. Because it takes a lot more effort these days to sift through it all and find non-biased, even-keeled facts.

These are very uneasy times. I hope that in our attempts to make sense of it, we aren't jumping to fear-based conclusions and instead focusing on discovering, in time, everything we can to avoid things like this happening again.

xo.