Why the real evil of the Boston bombings is how we're all to blame for this stupidity
One suspect dead and another on the run, but we're asking the wrong questions says Fleet Street Fox
Evil is a nice, easy word.It means you can blame wrongness for being wrong. You can say it was the devil, it was one of those things, it was someone who was twisted, it was wicked, it was heartless.And when we've blamed those things, why, it's done with. There's nothing you can do about Beelzebub, or scumbags, or someone determined to be as bad as they can. These things happen.So when someone set off two pressure cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon, it was tragic and awful but more than anything else it was evil.When the FBI announced they had two suspects in baseball caps, they were innocent until proven guilty but their photographs were spread around the world like social media trying to pass on the lurgy - tag, you're it, and run away.Now there's been a firefight and the suspects named, with at time of writing one of them dead and the other on the run, there are chilling pictures of unknown provenance showing one of them in the crowds just behind eight-year-old Martin Richard, the boy blown apart by the bomb.
Photo claiming to be of Boston bomb suspect and victim Martin Richard
Whether the image has been tweaked or not, it is the very definition of wrong - an innocent child, a happy crowd, a sunny spring day, and a threatening shade stalking through it all with malicious intent. It is wickedness in a baseball cap, it is the twisted dissonance of all our underlying fears.If someone faked the picture, it's even wronger still.And long before we know for sure who the suspects are, before we know if they are also the perpetrators of a heinous crime, and long before anyone discovers what their motives may have been, we call it - and them - evil.We don't use the word 'worrying'. We don't say they must have serious mental health issues.We don't wonder how the FBI couldn't find them before but yet turned them up within days of people being blown up.We don't ask ourselves why two people apparently involved in the worst terror attack on the US mainland in 12 years stuck around for the manhunt, or even stuck together.We call them armed and dangerous, rather than armed and stupid. Stupid is more worrying, and stupid is what the bombers were, no matter their IQs or level of academic attainment.Only a moron would think you could wander into the centre of any major Western city and not have your every move tracked on CCTV - creating videos which, after your atrocity, will be scoured by law enforcement agencies to track you back to your home postcode.Only the seriously thick would think putting on a baseball cap causes more than a few seconds' delay in identifying you, and it's would take the pathologically dense to go to the effort of wearing one only to put it on back to front so that even its temporary camouflage is wasted.Added to which, you'd need to be someone who's in need of medication to think that your actions won't be tweeted, shared, linked, and otherwise passed around from the first glass first tinkling to Earth all the way to the point you die in a hail of bullets, along with whatever strange message you thought your bomb would tell us.It's stupid to think a bomb will change anyone's mind. It's stupid to think you won't get caught once the state wants to find you, whether you're blowing up marathons or driving without due care and attention.More than anything else, it's stupid to call stuff evil because when you do that you dismiss it - you shrug it off, you say it's one of those things, you shudder, you grieve, and you don't change a damn thing.All of us get away with what no-one else much cares about. You can blow people up in Chechnya all the day long, and Barack Obama won't intervene. You can drive as you please unless you do it in front of a copper, and you can abuse little children right up to the point the legal barriers to publishing the allegations are lifted.Don't you see it's our own inaction which is evil? It's not what they do, or why they do it, because bombers and perverts and bad drivers alike are made, not born. What's wicked is the way those of us who sit and watch these things unfold like voyeurs still abdicate ourselves from being part of it.We don't make an effort with missing people, or the mentally ill, and then we act surprised when one of them leaves the reservation. We guard privacy so carefully that we create secrecy for those with bad intentions, we don't stop a bad driver until after they've mown down a mother and child in the street.We don't use any of the right words or ask any of the most sensible questions because to do so would be to admit there was something we could do - that we have a share of the responsibility.We don't commit the crimes, because we don't want to and we're bright enough to know how easy it is to be caught. But as a human race, as a species which stupidly and blindly insists bad things happen because some people are just wicked, we do everything we can to help those crimes happen.And when they do, the grief, the horror, the hate, is directed at the stupid people who didn't have the capacity to figure out all the things we already knew. We shoot them down in a hail of bullets, and tell ourselves there's less evil in the world.Yet we never run out of stupid people, and somehow they keep on outwitting us.Don't you think that's worrying?
One suspect dead and another on the run, but we're asking the wrong questions says Fleet Street Fox
Evil is a nice, easy word.It means you can blame wrongness for being wrong. You can say it was the devil, it was one of those things, it was someone who was twisted, it was wicked, it was heartless.And when we've blamed those things, why, it's done with. There's nothing you can do about Beelzebub, or scumbags, or someone determined to be as bad as they can. These things happen.So when someone set off two pressure cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon, it was tragic and awful but more than anything else it was evil.When the FBI announced they had two suspects in baseball caps, they were innocent until proven guilty but their photographs were spread around the world like social media trying to pass on the lurgy - tag, you're it, and run away.Now there's been a firefight and the suspects named, with at time of writing one of them dead and the other on the run, there are chilling pictures of unknown provenance showing one of them in the crowds just behind eight-year-old Martin Richard, the boy blown apart by the bomb.
Photo claiming to be of Boston bomb suspect and victim Martin Richard Whether the image has been tweaked or not, it is the very definition of wrong - an innocent child, a happy crowd, a sunny spring day, and a threatening shade stalking through it all with malicious intent. It is wickedness in a baseball cap, it is the twisted dissonance of all our underlying fears.If someone faked the picture, it's even wronger still.And long before we know for sure who the suspects are, before we know if they are also the perpetrators of a heinous crime, and long before anyone discovers what their motives may have been, we call it - and them - evil.We don't use the word 'worrying'. We don't say they must have serious mental health issues.We don't wonder how the FBI couldn't find them before but yet turned them up within days of people being blown up.We don't ask ourselves why two people apparently involved in the worst terror attack on the US mainland in 12 years stuck around for the manhunt, or even stuck together.We call them armed and dangerous, rather than armed and stupid. Stupid is more worrying, and stupid is what the bombers were, no matter their IQs or level of academic attainment.Only a moron would think you could wander into the centre of any major Western city and not have your every move tracked on CCTV - creating videos which, after your atrocity, will be scoured by law enforcement agencies to track you back to your home postcode.Only the seriously thick would think putting on a baseball cap causes more than a few seconds' delay in identifying you, and it's would take the pathologically dense to go to the effort of wearing one only to put it on back to front so that even its temporary camouflage is wasted.Added to which, you'd need to be someone who's in need of medication to think that your actions won't be tweeted, shared, linked, and otherwise passed around from the first glass first tinkling to Earth all the way to the point you die in a hail of bullets, along with whatever strange message you thought your bomb would tell us.It's stupid to think a bomb will change anyone's mind. It's stupid to think you won't get caught once the state wants to find you, whether you're blowing up marathons or driving without due care and attention.More than anything else, it's stupid to call stuff evil because when you do that you dismiss it - you shrug it off, you say it's one of those things, you shudder, you grieve, and you don't change a damn thing.All of us get away with what no-one else much cares about. You can blow people up in Chechnya all the day long, and Barack Obama won't intervene. You can drive as you please unless you do it in front of a copper, and you can abuse little children right up to the point the legal barriers to publishing the allegations are lifted.Don't you see it's our own inaction which is evil? It's not what they do, or why they do it, because bombers and perverts and bad drivers alike are made, not born. What's wicked is the way those of us who sit and watch these things unfold like voyeurs still abdicate ourselves from being part of it.We don't make an effort with missing people, or the mentally ill, and then we act surprised when one of them leaves the reservation. We guard privacy so carefully that we create secrecy for those with bad intentions, we don't stop a bad driver until after they've mown down a mother and child in the street.We don't use any of the right words or ask any of the most sensible questions because to do so would be to admit there was something we could do - that we have a share of the responsibility.We don't commit the crimes, because we don't want to and we're bright enough to know how easy it is to be caught. But as a human race, as a species which stupidly and blindly insists bad things happen because some people are just wicked, we do everything we can to help those crimes happen.And when they do, the grief, the horror, the hate, is directed at the stupid people who didn't have the capacity to figure out all the things we already knew. We shoot them down in a hail of bullets, and tell ourselves there's less evil in the world.Yet we never run out of stupid people, and somehow they keep on outwitting us.Don't you think that's worrying?