Friday, April 19, 2013

A grim morning

I woke up to one of the Boston bombers dead, and one fleeing the authorities.

And I know what's next.  Blaming people.  After Sandy Hook we blamed guns.  After West, Texas we blamed fertilizer.  After Oklahoma City we blamed the home grown militia.  After 9/11 we blamed Islam.

It's what we do.  When life doesn't make sense, we start to assign blame.  

It seems the two Boston bombers are foreign nationals, that are now permanent citizens.  I give it five minutes before immigrants are blamed.

And, for the record:  Immigrants aren't to blame for Boston.  Islam isn't to blame for 9/11, guns aren't to blame for Sandy Hook.  Though the fertilizer in West, Texas.... yeah... that was totally to blame.

I have two thoughts about this:

  1. If these two die before revealing WHY they did it, their point is lost.  Seriously... they should have offed themselves, and saved everyone the trouble.  (I KNOW they were bombing for a reason.... but we may never know the reason)
  2. Can we stop assigning blame for these things?
For all of the devastating things that have happened in this country, there is no one thing that we can blame.  There's a multitude of reasons that these acts happen.

But I think a huge contributing factor is hate.

Hate of others, hate of religion, hate of politics.

Just hate.

Honestly, if this country could learn to meet in the middle, instead of pulling apart to the polar opposites we might have less of this.

I guess if we were just a little more optimistic, and more Pollyanna-like maybe these things would happen less.

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