The Boston Marathon bombing was not an incomprehensible one-time horror but a sign of our times rich in lessons for those with sense enough to learn them.
Lesson One: Evil Exists
FOXs aging blonde bombshell Gretchen Carlson reaching for that anguished existential aporia that the GOP associates with compassion and sensitivity lamented one morning this past week that she didnt know how to explain the Marathon Massacre to her little daughter. For good measure she tossed the Sandy Hook atrocity (what media mouths call a tragedy" in their dense haze) into her growing file of Things We Cant Explain to Our Kids (and Shouldnt Have To).
Ive been rereading The Captains Daughter lately by Alexander Pushkin. It occurs to me that children might have asked of their parents during Pugachevs Rebellion Mommy why does that old Bashkir have his ears and nose cut off and why is there just a little stump instead of a tongue when he opens his mouth? Mommy why did those Cossacks throw the sergeants head over the palisade? Mommy why did the Cossacks hang all the officers and club the Commandants wife to death after coming through the gate? Mommy why are they ripping your clothes off beating you and jumping on you one after another?"
Gretchen if you dont know what to tell your daughter as she matures amid the moral squalor and depravity of human beings youd better find some answers fast. Evil didnt arrive yesterday and its not going away tomorrow even though theres rather less of certain evils today than three hundred years ago. If I may ask a question of you… why do you appear to believe that theres something unique and outrageous about the necessity you face of dealing with this problem? Why do you think that your daughter has a right to spend the rest of her life in the artificial Shangri-La which your affluence has shakily raised around her?
Lesson Two: Damage Control by Vilifying the Right
We should all be beginning to understand by now (or those of us who arent fanatical ideologues or otherwise intellectually impaired) that the Obama Administration defines as a problem only that which creates bad press for it. David Axelrod lost no time insinuating that the Boston Marathon horror was the handiwork of Tea Party terrorists protesting tax day. His boss meanwhile avoided every possible occasion to call the deed terrorism right up until his very evasion of the t" word became news. At last prodded and galled Obama declared any privately detonated bomb a terrorist act by definition (cf. Charles Krauthammers column for the Kennebec Journal 4/21/2013). His rear-guard non-correction almost seemed to say Well of course it was terrorism! How far do I have to dumb down to reach the rest of you?"
(One of many ironies here is that Obamas self-evident" defense is ridiculous. Safe-crackers who employ a bomb to get at loot for instance are not committing an act of terrorism.)
Other Democratsnotably Steny Hoyerannounced that Republican intransigence leading to The Sequester should be blamed for last Mondays grim events (see thepolitico.com 4/16/2013). Boston would have been crawling with canine cops and men in black if only we hadnt slowed the growth of our debt by an infinitesimal amount.
Meanwhile the one respect in which the Administration demonstrated initiative and alacrity was in the attempted deportation of a shady Saudi national. Once this became a public-relations land mine Janet Napoletano was sent to the front line armed with indignant denials that she or her boss had anything to do with the subterfuge. And they dont know how Jay-Z got into Cuba either.
If Timothy McVeigh were doing twenty-five-to-life like say a Weatherman who had killed a security guard the Left would be sending him a Christmas card every year. He remains their single and oh-so-cherished example of a Right Wing terrorist or something close to it (though those bullet-heads in the Navy dishonorably discharged him from their savage ranks). Even McVeigh however targeted a government building and ended up annihilating a day-care facility only through klutzy stupidity. A Tax-Day Terrorist would have gone for a federal building new and brilliant in imperial arrogancenot for any edifice or event of reverend provenance to the Minuteman crowd. How much weed do you have to smoke to come up with these Tea Party conspiracy-scenarios?
Lesson Three: An Armed Populace Is a Safer Populace
MIT campus security guard Sean Collier was murdered in his squad car on Thursday night. There ensued a manhunt during which much of the metropolis of Boston was on lockdown. If Dzhokhar Tsarnaev shattered the bay window of your den you were to barricade yourself and your family in the bathroom (one supposes) while dialing 911. Of course bathroom doors are constructed more or less like the ones at Fort Knox.
Colliers tragic death" is especially instructive. Even when we have armed guards at educational institutions they are no guarantee against the predations of a homicidal maniac. Indeed any person in uniform is wearing a target on his back and any such person who does regular rounds or drives a distinctly marked vehicle is a sitting duck.
If Dirty Harry had been in plain clothes at the Marathon the ignition of the bombs could probably still not have been prevented. The greater the number of our mature level-headed citizens who have permits to carry concealed weapons however the less likely such situations are to escalate. What if the brother-terrorists had been wearing suicide vests and had attempted to run into crowds of survivors as a finishing touch to their hellish days work? Who would have brought them down if all the uniformed officers were dutifully sprinting back to the scene of the original explosion?
Lesson Four: Theres More Than One Way to Skin a Cat
Pursuant to Lesson Three need we say further that semi-automatic assault weapons with large magazines and/or clips (whatever all that means to you) are unnecessary to commit mass-murder? Some nails and a few compounds under your kitchen sink or in the garage will do the trick. In fact far superior to either method is computer proficiency. While our legislators are at the pressing business of banning guns why not add computers to the list?
In its infinitely false wisdom our age has chosen to make high-tech society centripetal rather than centrifugal though the latter course would have been as feasible (if not as flattering to the power-hungry) as the former. Clean water for instance might have been gathered processed and stored by each home from natures bounty of rains… but instead we all must draw upon the polluted groundwater system that Big Brother has benignly detoxified for us at huge treatment plants. An evil hacker could send poison dribbling from our tapsfrom hundreds of thousands of tapsjust by buggering up the proportions of cleansing" chemicals. (Fluoride for examplethe stuff in your toothpastecan be lethal in too great a dose.)
We have scarcely scratched the surface of the twenty-first centurys potential horrors… and our leaders" have dedicated themselves to an initiative just slightly more sophisticated than ensuring that the knives in kitchen drawers arent too sharp.
Lesson Five: Rethink Traditions
There follows an obligation for all thoughtful careful people to reevaluate their routine activities. What was once safe and fun may be deadly in the future. The coincidental explosion of the fertilizer plant in West Texas (located in what we call central Texas down here) both reiterates Lesson Four and illustrates this point. The plants explosion was indeed an accident (and hence a true tragedy by the way); yet how many such targets where hundreds or thousands of people live and work are just waiting for a lit match to fall? To be sure industrial accidents are far less frequent today than a century ago… but the matches I have in made will not be accidentally lit. We must begin seeing our familiar surroundings as a diabolical mind may see them.
Perhaps we should forego that yearly family reunion at Disneyworld during peak season when airborne or microbial attacks would be at least as effective as bombs in claiming victims. Perhaps we should stay at home morealthough once again the centripety which our social engineers have designed constantly encourages us to create tempting targets. As individuals however we can resist the unwholesome magnetism of rock concerts and Million Man Marches. I would rather have to explain to my daughter why a suitcase bomb went off at the Lincoln Memorial than not have a daughter alive to hear the explanation.
One of my fears on this score is that the Gretchen Carlsons of the worldnave conflict-averse pampered and complacently affluentmay prefer a magnification to the tenth power of government surveillance in our lives. In words dictated earlier this month to a Florida fourth-grader by his teacher I am willing to give up some of my constitutional rights in order to be safer or more secure" (reported by theblaze.com 4/4/2013). We know that the terrorists bomb ends in death and mutilation; we do not know where the favors" of Big Brother may end. If we choose his protection" will our children even have sons and daughters to whom they must explain evil and death? MSNBCs progressivist hack Melissa Harris-Perry has also told us this month that our children dont really belong to us but to the State (see theblaze.com 4/13/2012). How long before the State is producing whatever children it needs on the assembly line of Huxleys Brave New World?
Lesson Six: The Fetal Posture Characterizes Death As Well As Birth
The charred human remains exhumed from Pompeii and the mummified sacrificial victims raised from northwestern European peat bogs often remind one of babies in the womb. Being doubled over and hunkered down is natural in a fetus; but when you assume the same position in life under pressure your day is likely to end before the sun sets. We Americans are terribly spoiled. Maybe we dont need to run marathons any more. Maybe we should not drop our toddlers off daily at quite such a tender age in order to pursue our careers unfettered. Maybe we should get a little scared and a little madlike adults who recognize that the river harbors crocodilesrather than squealing indignantly like royal princes and princesses that we have not been adequately protected. Why is there still in 2013 not a red button at the reception desk of every school that sounds an instant loud alarm campus-wide upon an armed intruders appearance? Why do we think we have the right to exist in a state where such things never happen?
This lesson comes very close to closing the circle with Lesson Onebut it is also distinct. Christians are all obliged to profess that they acknowledge the reality of evil yet too many of themof usbelieve that a constant turning of the cheek is the only Christian response. Im sure that Ms. Carlson has a good heart and loves God sincerely. Christ had to be crucified to fulfill his mission so he stayed Peters sword. This is not by any means however equivalent to telling us that we should huddle around our children in the face of danger and program them to abhor blades and bullets until finally none of them ever grows up imagining such a thing. Somebody in our eternally perverse species will always crystallize evil into lethal shapes. As the brave man doesnt run from death with his eyes covered so the good man doesnt grow squeamish at the idea of forcible resistance in defense of innocence. The run-and-hide approach is indeed it seems to me a worship of life in the body rather than a commitment to life in the spirit.
Lets stop pretending that guns will go away if we all scream Bad! Bad!" whenever we see one and that terrorists will vanish if we try really hard to understand what they want.