About The Boston Bombings

A whole lot of interesting articles are showing up on my Facebook homepage (cuz that’s the only social life I have) about these bombings. Amy Davidson from the New York Times is writing about some Saudi kid who got caught after being injured in the blast and cast as the case’s first ‘suspect’, and how wrong that is. And then, an even more interesting article from The Guardian by Glenn Greenwald, annoyed that everyone was so quick to blame the Muslims, how irresponsible the media is/was in enforcing this assumption, and how Americans just can’t seem to register the fact that THEIR government is bombing people in places other than Boston. Ok, is it just me, or are there a whole lot of people out there condemning the oh-so-predictable-and-unimaginative-Western-world’s-reaction to the Boston bombings? Notice, they’re condemning the reactions, not the bombings. I mean, of course they condemn the bombings, but notice that they also condemn the reactions to it (if you still haven’t figured out what I mean, I’m talking about the typical blaming of Muslim individuals/groups without the least bit of evidence anywhere). And it isn’t Arabic or Muslim writers/bloggers/journalists, its home grown Westerners (doing the condemning). I find this interesting, because for the first time in a long time I’m reading phrases like, “These are exactly the kinds of horrific, civilian-slaughtering attacks that the US has been bringing to countries in the Muslim world over and over and over again for the last decade, with very little attention paid,” as a comment to everyone being so upset about the Boston bombings but not bothering in the least with the zillions of people being blast to pieces all over Iraq and Afghanistan, and like, “There are people at Guantanamo who have also been cleared by our own government, and are still there.” Guantanamo? Ho billai that place still exists? People generally either don’t remember or don’t care about all the people in those orange jumpsuits locked up indefinitely with no one to help them but God.

I would like to write a long and intelligent-sounding post on this matter, and try and analyse the logic behind this strange new phenomenon, but I can’t. I just find it curiously interesting that not just the articles surfacing, but also the comments to those articles, are slowly starting to change. Of course, there are your usual idiotic anti-Islam rants from people who fearlessly risk their looking extremely stupid in order to deliver their timeless message of patriotism and purity, but still.

Don’t get me wrong. I feel a deep rage about these bombings and shootings and for the life of me can’t fathom the point of killing children or even adults just to prove a point. But I feel the same about children and adults elsewhere in the world getting bombed to smithereens by Americans or Brits or whatever, also just to prove a point. I can’t remember the last time I watched the news because it’s all about dead people. Lots of dead people. And yet, there is hope, it seems.