Responses To The Boston Marathon Attacks: Good And Bad

At approximately 2:50 PM ET yesterday, two bombs were detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

Per usual, Twitter became the place where realtime information, both credible and otherwise, started flying at a furious pace.

Initial reports were that three explosions occurred - two on the marathon route and one at the JFK Library. Later, the reports of the library were corrected to reflect an unrelated fire that happened at around the same time of the explosions. Initially, there were rumors of three unexploded bombs being found, but that was revised to one unexploded bomb later.

Accounts of dozens of injured including those with amputations started surfacing. Zero deaths were reported at first, but later we were told that three people died. One of those killed was an eight year old boy, Martin Richard - seen here with a sign he made calling for peace.

There are many fact-laden accounts written by paid writers of media outlets, so I won’t repeat the long list of details that those organizations have presented already.

The focus here will be on how people responded.

Immediately, people of all political stripes began to speculate and politicize the tragedy. The partisanship on Twitter is as dependable as the day is long.

The Bad and Cryptic

Erik Rush, a Fox News contributor, accused Muslims of committing the atrocity with no proof. When called out on it, Mr. Rush doubled down and stated that all “evil” Muslims should killed. He then deleted his tweet, but later said this was sarcasm. Ah, those neocons… always willing to stand for what they believe in, until they don’t.

Bill Maher wants America to handle the bombings like the Israeli response to Germany’s botched hostage management at the Munich olympics. Maybe Bill forgot that innocent people were killed by the Israelis in their outdated and narcissistic “eye for an eye” excuse to globe-trot while murdering people. Or maybe Bill is emulating his pal Obama by calling for reckless responses like Obama’s drone strikes that have killed about 1,000 innocent people. One wonders.

Chris Matthews said that most domestic terrorism tends to be done by those on the far right. Perhaps Matthews never heard of Bill Ayers, Ralph Chaplin and socialist labor unions, Spartacists, or the Black Panthers.

A fake Boston Marathon account pulled the “We’ll donate a dollar for every Twitter retweet that this tweet receives” and racked up thousands of followers and tens of thousand of retweets. I contacted Dick Costolo, Twitter’s CEO, about it and the account was suspended in short order.

Notorious hyper-partisan political propagandist, Michael Moore, was trying to tell us something with this tweet, but he’s not brave enough to tell us outright, so he resorted to something vague and cryptic. Read between the lines.

The typically light-in-the-loafers gang over at Esquire magazine warned their effeminate readers that evil white men like Timothy McVeigh might be behind it.

Alex Jones, who’s known for assigning conspiracies to everything from 9/11 to the sun’s rising in the east, referred to the bombings as a “false flag” and implicated the FBI.

Aaron Walker, a neocon attorney who was fired for inciting Muslims and for poor job performance, insinuated that a leftist activist and felon from the 70s, he and his neocon pals have lost 15+ legal actions to, had masterminded the bombings. Sour grapes or just stupidity? Maybe a little of both.

Aside from the negativity and posturing, there was some positivity yesterday.

The Good

There are countless stories of the brave and goodhearted who stepped up to help their fellow Americans yesterday, but these stories stuck out.

Cat Cronin, a woman who claims to be a former Air Force medic, now working as an EMS worker in Boston, shared a pic of a two-year-old and called him the bravest victim of the tragedy that she’d seen all day. She’s since hidden her Twitter account. Her last tweet was to a reporter for ABC who was trying to get permission to use her pics/story.

Thousands of Bostonians were offering a place to stay for those affected by the the bombings, and their hospitality was compiled into a Google doc.

In New York, home Boston’s long-time sports rival, this sentiment was captured by Brown and Company.

 

There’s this story of Carlos Arredondo, the “cowboy hat hero”, a member of The Red Cross’ disaster team, who wasted no time jumping into action to help the wounded.

AP Photo

 

MIT’s Green Building, known for it’s “hackable” exterior, displayed Old Glory later in the evening.

 

The speculation behind this tragedy continues today. People might not claim responsibility for the bombings, so we might have to wait for law enforcement to do the hard investigative work before we know who was behind them. However, from my vantage point, the overwhelming goodness in people is winning out over the attack and the negative responses to it.

Our first president sums up the sentiment quite nicely.

“My first wish is to see this plague of mankind banished from the earth, and the sons and daughters of this world employed in more pleasing and innocent amusements, than in preparing implements and exercising them for the destruction of mankind.” - George Washington

 

 

About Brooks Bayne

Bacon and bourbon.

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