Global Comment

Where the world thinks out loud

Terrorism in Boston: Why Speculation and Sensitivity Matter

In the wake of the bombing attack on the Boston Massacre yesterday, one quote by the late Fred Rogers went viral. It said:

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me,
“Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers—so many caring people in this world.

This is surely helpful advice for people in terrorized communities working to heal, as well as for children who feel frightened after hearing about scary events in the news. It’s not the quote itself that is objectionable. I was even inspired by people on social media who tweeted constant information about who the “helpers” were and what others could do to help. It was a fitting way way of recognizing the oft ignored heroism of first responders and others on the scene motivated to stick around and serve the shattered and wounded.

Those of us who observed from a distance also needed practical information in the aftermath of the tragedy. We needed to know that people were—and are—banding together to help their communities heal, whether opening their homes to displaced people or serving on the ground. And of course we needed practical information about what we could do to help from a distance, whether it meant donating money and/or providing emotional support to friends as they worked to locate loved ones who had been downtown at the time of the explosions.

Of course it is crucial to know about the helpers, for practical reasons and because knowing they are there helps as we struggle to make sense of the inexplicable and find meaning as we try to keep going. But.

***

By approximately the sixty-seventh time I saw the quote circulated, I began to sense a reductive and possibly dangerous sensibility emerging in the public discourse. That is, as extremists like Pamela Gellar shouted about “jihad,” thoughtful people responded by strictly adhering to the positive and the hopeful—and refusing to engage in speculation at all.

It’s true that bad speculation is dangerous and hurtful. Just hours after the bombings took place, a heckler at a Boston press conference asked, “Why were loudspeakers telling people in the audience to be calm moments before the bomb went off? Is this another false flag staged attack to take our civil liberties from Homeland Security while sticking our hands down our pants in the street?”

Bigots like Pamela Gellar and conspiracy theorists like the heckler illustrate the worst and most destructive forms of speculation. We are right to resist them, and personally speaking, I hope someone identifies that heckler because I would welcome the chance to participate in Google-bombing that cruel, tone-deaf speaker straight to hell.

But I do not think the worst and most destructive speculation is representative of speculationas such. I think it’s the content of the speculation that matters, not speculation itself. And we need responsible, informed speculation. We need to be sure that we don’t cede the realm of speculation to people like Gellar or the heckler.

***

I have long felt that better information and more informed speculation might go some distance toward quelling the destructive and reactionary impulses so many people demonstrate in the wake of mass atrocity.

I vividly remember the morning of September 12, 2001. I was a junior at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Early that day, I learned that a Latino man working for a local Lebanese restaurant had been violently attacked by someone who had uttered Islamophobic slurs. The worker wasn’t a Muslim, but that was irrelevant. He was attacked for associating with a Middle Eastern business and being brown.

Accounts like these circulated around the country in the days, months and years after
September 11. Our non-Muslim people turned against Muslims with startling ferocity. Even our “progressive” little college town of Chapel Hill quickly turned into a place that felt unsafe for virtually all the Muslim students I knew there. I talked to women who had decided to abandon their headscarves, fearing that such simple expressions of Muslim identity made them targets. A woman from Karachi told me her father had raised an American flag outside the house just to avert the suspicions of the neighbors. All Muslims were being treated as possible suspects at that moment, and that father needed to reassure everyone that he was a loyal American.

I continue to believe that a better, more informed media narrative might have gone some
distance in preventing some of these attacks on Muslim residents and citizens. I believe we are tasked with speaking intelligently about what might have happened in order to prevent people like Fox News anchor Erik Rush, who <ahref=http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/erik-rush-on-boston-marathon-explosions-muslims-are-evil-lets-kill-them-all/news/2013/04/15/65290>declared yesterday that the U.S. should kill all Muslims, from controlling or even influencing the narrative.

When people with large platforms say such things, others are going to respond by going out to kill Muslims on their own. Atrocity heaped on atrocity. We must intervene in media narratives like this. That is a moral imperative. And we have to do it immediately—precisely because the first 24 hours into a news cycle is the most influential when
it comes to shaping public discussion.

I’m not saying that everyone must do this. People in Boston are clearly more concerned with loss and survival right now than with deconstructing harmful narratives. And even people outside the city may feel too emotionally drained to engage in this sort of criticism right now. I think that’s absolutely fine.

The problem is the way in which a quote meant to help people heal began to be used as a
weapon yesterday. It was used to shut down people who dared to “politicize” the tragedy. I felt personally scolded by the zillionth time I saw the quote circulated.

Now I suspect that a false dichotomy was being drawn between reassurance and compassion.
The former was cast as humane and the latter as unfeeling. The overwhelming message of the day was that we should all be focusing on the positive. Compassion and analysis were treated as mutually exclusive forms of response—as if we couldn’t allow both to happen simultaneously, as if it was important to shut down the voices we couldn’t relate to. “If you can’t say anything nice,don’t say anything at all.”

I’ve always found isolated reassurances pretty hollow, and I’ve never once found a platitude reassuring in any meaningful way. I’m happy to be reassured, but not if it comes at the cost of intelligent commentary that pushes back on the extremism human suffering always seems to invite. The President should have referred to the bombing as “terrorism,” whether or not a white person or white-dominated group might have been responsible. When we don’t say anything at all, we cede the immediate conversation to truthers and birthers. And that is negligent. I’d rather risk being tactless in the aftermath of a tragedy than actually being negligent, and allowing the conspiracy theorists to amass more credibility than they deserve.

We need good speculation just as much as we need to continue shining a light on the helpers. People are going to speculate no matter what. And it’s productive to push back on bigoted speculation to improve the quality of the discussion. Helping and discussing are not mutually exclusive, and we must have both.