A Little Perspective

So, the 2014 Boston Marathon has passed off without a hitch, as every sensible person expected it would. But of course, this wouldn't be America if, after last year's bombing, participants in this year's race weren't subjected to overwrought, ridiculous, and unnecessary so-called "security" measures. The new rules were reported a few weeks ago in the Globe:

Runners who like to run in costume won't be allowed to wear anything that covers their face or bulky clothes; strollers won't be allowed at the Athletes' Village near the starting line in Hopkinton or around the finish line on Boylston Street; neither will backpacks, glass containers, any container that can carry more than 1 liter of liquid, vests with pockets, or suitcases and rolling bags.

People will also be forbidden from wearing backpacks that carry water--such as CamelBaks. Props like sports and military equipment will be banned, as well as flags or signs that are wider than 11 inches and longer than 17 inches.

Bags, used in the past by runners to carry clothes and other personal items, will be banned on the buses that carry runners from Boston Common to Hopkinton, where the race starts. And no bags will be brought by those buses back to Boston.

Now, get out there and have fun, kids!

Seriously, people, we have to stop doing this. I'm fed up with the way this country reacts to tragedies. Each backlash is more over-the-top than the one before. These new marathon policies are so cartoonish, they could almost have come from the Onion. No bags? No strollers? No fucking pockets? At a free outdoor event? This has become a compulsion. We Americans like to act tough, pound our chests, congratulate ourselves on our ability to triumph over adversity. Well, this is not triumphing over adversity. This is cowering in a corner. If you have to keep talking about how strong and brave you are, you only show that you're weak and afraid.

It appears these particular rules were written by the Boston Athletic Association, the host of the marathon. The City of Boston was more circumspect:

Boston Police Department (BPD) will have an increased presence of uniformed and undercover officers along the marathon route.

Over 100 cameras have been installed along the Boston portion of the Marathon route, and upwards of 50 observation points will be set up around the finish line area in the Back Bay to monitor the crowd....

Spectators are encouraged to leave large items such as backpacks and strollers at home. These items are not banned; however, individuals may be subject to search.

(I'd lay odds that those "over 100 cameras" so helpfully installed along the route are a permanent fixture now. Exceptional circumstances become the new normal.)

I work in Boston, just a few blocks away from the marathon finish line, though I always have the day off for Patriots' Day, a state holiday. I also live in the suburbs less than five miles from the site of the notorious manhunt and shootout in Watertown. That week last year was surreal, to say the least. Since then, the news media has incessantly covered every detail of the bombing, but as far as I'm concerned, the case was solved within a week, the perpetrators were caught, and the threat is long over. What concerns me more now are the broader policy implications of what happened. Will we learn all the wrong lessons? It looks like the answer is yes.

It's a familiar pattern. I brace myself after every tragedy now, waiting for the backlash, the inevitable piling-on. Though he got a lot of flak for it at the time, I'll admit I agreed with David Sirota when he wrote that he hoped the bombers were white Americans. When white Americans shoot up schools, movie theaters, or military bases, public policy doesn't change--as much as most of us, including me, think it should. But acts of violence by foreign actors (or, as in this case, people perceived to be foreign actors, but who were, in fact, home-grown criminals) are always existential, a justification for drastic changes to the American "way of life." After the Newtown shooting, it was business as usual. After a terrorist attack by radical Muslims, the world is a fundamentally different place, the entire framework of civil society is undermined, and our Constitutional rights must be reconsidered. And it didn't take long. It was only a matter of hours after the bombing before Lindsey Graham was calling the Tsarnaevs "enemy combatants" and he and others were insisting Miranda didn't apply. I half expected to hear we'd be invading Chechnya.

As if the events of those days weren't bad enough, they were followed by the occupation of Boston by the U.S. military; 24-hour news coverage, speculation, and propaganda by ideologues; irrelevant debates on immigration; ridiculous outrage over a magazine cover as if it had magical powers; and general exploitation of the bombing, right alongside the attacks of 9/11, to justify suspicionless searches and mass surveillance of innocent Americans. Bostonians were expected to follow the latest breaking news, analyze each new development with friends and co-workers, participate in city-wide prayers (i.e., moments of silence), make a pilgrimage to the marathon finish line, and purchase "Boston Strong" gear. I can understand this kind of reaction from those personally affected by the bombing, but at a certain point the collective PTSD becomes pathological. The catharsis crosses the line into something almost cultish.

By way of comparison, consider this: Just nine days after the bombings, over 1,100 people were killed in a factory collapse in Savar, Bangladesh, and it barely registered as a blip in the American media. How many people die in Baghdad every day? Mogadishu? Of course, those places are far away. "How dare this happen to us?" is the subtext of Boston's outrage. So how about a statistic from closer to home? Over 30 people are shot and killed in America every day, and they are almost entirely ignored. We need a little perspective. We can't afford to let one crime paralyze us the way this one has.

The aim of terrorists is to terrorize. Fear makes people easy to manipulate, short-circuits their judgment, and leads them to act irrationally. So congratulations to the terrorists on their success, I guess.

Unfortunately, in this country, criticism of national security policy is too often characterized as callousness toward victims, in the same way criticism of military policy is characterized as insufficient support for the troops. All I propose is that we stop running around like headless chickens. Let's not give terrorists and criminals this kind of power over us. Let's not act as if, because of one bombing in the entire 117-year history of the Boston Marathon, attacks are now an inevitability and every public event is inherently dangerous. Let's not strip these events of everything that makes them fun. Let's not turn this country into a land of garrisons and checkpoints. Let's not treat civil liberties as if they're expendable. Let's give terrorists a great big finger to the sky by going on with our lives.

That would be something we could really be proud of.


Some articles from last year:
April 15, 2013 "The Boston bombing privacy lesson"
April 16, 2013 "After the bomb, mass hysteria is the Boston terrorist's greatest weapon"
April 16, 2013 "Eight facts about terrorism in the United States"
April 17, 2013 "How Not to Respond to the Boston Marathon Bombings"
April 17, 2013 "No, Fear of Terrorism is Not the 'New Normal'"
April 17, 2013 "As a Bostonian and Muslim, I wept Monday - and worried"
April 17, 2013 "The Saudi Marathon Man"
April 18, 2013 "When Fear Threatens Freedom"
April 19, 2013 "Manhunt Underway, Boston Under Lockdown"
April 19, 2013 "A Moment of Silence for Boston"
April 19, 2013 "Why Should I Care That No One's Reading Dzhokhar Tsarnaev His Miranda Rights?"
April 20, 2013 "ACLU: Denying Miranda rights to marathon bombing suspect is 'un-American'"
April 20, 2013 "Why does America lose its head over 'terror' but ignore its daily gun deaths?"
April 20, 2013 "America's willingness to be terrified by terrorism"
April 22, 2013 "Every time a bomb goes off, the surveillance state grows stronger"
April 22, 2013 "After Boston: The Banality of Shock and Sentiment"
April 22, 2013 "How Boston exposes the frailty of American democracy"
April 22, 2013 "Sorry, Lindsey Graham, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Is No 'Enemy Combatant'"
April 22, 2013 "After Boston: Don't Get Fooled Again by the 'War on Terror' Hawks"
April 23, 2013 "'Cape Fear,' and Our Fear"
April 23, 2013 "Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has rights"
April 23, 2013 "Surveillance state no answer to terror"
April 23, 2013 "Boston bombing: FBI backlash 'risks turning US into surveillance state'"
April 24, 2013 "Will the Boston Bombings Kill the Public Police Scanner?"
April 25, 2013 "Mayor Bloomberg Is a Surveillance State Extremist, Not a Pragmatic Centrist"
April 26, 2013 "The Boston Bombing and Immigration"
April 29, 2013 "Let's show the world how it's done"
April 30, 2013 "The Burdens of Total Surveillance"
May 1, 2013 "The National Surveillance State 2.0"
May 2, 2013 "Boston and Beyond"
May 7, 2013 "Why Did They Clap for the Police?"