The bad echo of 9/11 is the risk of passively spectating a media melodrama. I hope instead Americans find their moral sense
It's never a good sign when your email box fills up – as mine did Monday afternoon – with earnest notes from folks hoping to verify that you and your family are "safe". Nor was the sudden cancellation, with no reason stated, of an event, the Boston Moth "Story Slam", which I was supposed to host that evening.
The sense of collective panic brought to mind the hours after 9/11. I'd learned about that tragedy, which took place a few years after my arrival in Boston, when my mother called to make sure I hadn't been on either of the two hijacked flights that departed from Logan airport.
So I was expecting something pretty awful when I checked news sites, something that might even warrant calling in my kids, who were happily digging up the remains of the back lawn in our little suburb north of the city. The event in question – the detonation of two bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon– was duly horrifying. But it was also, strictly speaking, minor in terms of danger to the public and casualties.
As of this writing, three people have died. Several dozen were seriously injured. By contrast, in Iraq Monday up to 50 people were killed and as many as 300 were wounded in attacks triggered by the upcoming elections. Two bombs went off in schools slated to serve polling places.
I don't mean to diminish the impact of the Boston bombings. I can't imagine the horror and grief experienced by those caught in the blasts, or their loved ones. But that's essentially my point: the horror, as such, was inflicted on a particular (and mostly random) set of people. It didn't happen to "Boston", or "America", or "our way of life".
The media's response, as in the hours after 9/11, has been incessant, hysterical, and sloppy. The Wall Street Journal reported that five additional bombs had been found around the city. The New York Post reported a death toll of 12. On and on it went, lurid rumor reported as fact, then corrected.
More disturbing to me was the tenor of the reporting: a familiar histrionic gravitas that is the modern Fourth Estate's default setting these days, particularly in the midst of constructing a major media event. I heard one reporter on National Public Radio claim that nothing would ever be the same, while another announced that the heart of Boston had been torn apart.
As a former reporter, I understand the desire to hype the story you're working on, to feel a part of history. But this sort of journalism exacts its own insidious damage. It fosters a culture in which the emotional duties and dividends of citizenship reside in consuming heart-wrenching spectacle, rather than engaging in genuine civic action.
And by now, it feels painfully familiar, an ingrained American mindset. Rather than building a massive lobbying effort to force our lawmakers to pass common-sense gun laws, we watch tape-loops from the most recent mass shooting fill our screens. Rather than pressuring our craven representatives to address climate change, we tune in to the latest weather disaster.
As a nation, we prefer bathing in the short-term thrills of melodrama to grappling with the long-term crises we're actually engaged in, ones that require us to do more than simply watch and emote.
Again: I mean this as no affront to those injured in Monday's explosions. A friend of ours ran in the marathon, and his wife was across the street with her three young boys when the bombs went off. I don't envy them the task of explaining to their kids what happened and what it means.
But when I heard about the bombs, and in particular, the fact that an eight year-old was among the three dead, what I mostly thought about was the little girl we know who's been battling a deadly disease for months.
The real question I'm struggling with, as the emails continue to stream in, is whether events such as Monday's bombing can somehow morally enlarge us as a nation, can help us imagine the suffering of other people and our own duty to those people – wherever they happen to live. Or whether we'll remain trapped in the lurid theatrics of the moment.
My money's on the latter, but I hope I'm wrong.