My daughter, just a bit younger than the Tsarnaev brothers, headed off to Boston one day and was actually in the air not yet landed at Logan when the bombs went off at the marathon. For the entire day, I kept in touch with her via text messaging. She and her mom made it to their hotel in South Boston after hackney services were restored, though they had to spend a fair amount of time in the airport first. Over the next couple of days, the drama we all know about unfolded.

We live in a culture where the visual trope rules. If a famous beauty is found by photographers with tussled hair, cellulite, or some food spilled on her shirt, that’s news. If a teabagger wants to depict Obama as a bad guy, he darkens the image because that racist trick works on a lot of people. They say (though I don’t assume it to be true) that Kennedy beat Nixon because Nixon had a bad five o’clock shadow. And so on. Massachusetts Trooper Sgt. Sean Murphy saw a picture of a bad guy that didn’t make him look like a bad guy and felt the need to risk his own career and violate the rules of his job, and probably violate his profession’s ethics, in order to “correct” that so the rest of us could go on hating Tsarnaev properly. He was wrong to do that. Nobody decided that it was OK to blow up people at the Boston Marathon because Tsarnaev looks like a hipster when he’s not all shot up lying in a boat in Watertown.

Also, this: If we insist that how you look has to match what you do, what you’ve done, what you might do, the kind of person you are, then we are fully subscribing to the worst in human nature. Think about it. If you are a woman and you wear certain cloths … If you have a certain color skin … If you seem to have a certain expression on your face …

Get over it, people. There is nothing wrong with Tsarnaev’s face. There is something wrong with Tsarnaev. These things are both true. Embrace the complexity that is reality.

I wish there had been a sound check, I could have had my mic up higher. Also, that notification beep you will repeatedly hear is not your computer (or mine) so just ignore it! Anyway, it is in two parts:

But there are winners. Twitter also won the day, in a small way, in that the Boston Emergency Management Services and the Boston PD used it effectively (it seems) to convey information to a lot of people. My daughter had just arrived in Boston in time for the mayhem, and I was able to use those twitter streams to text her information as she hunkered down in the airport trying to salvage her plans, for instance.

Another winner was the police authorities, despite the shortcomings mentioned above. They did in fact get the two guys. Unfortunately, they did so with loss of life and with injury among their own, which underscores the fact that when the police “win” they often do so at an unthinkable cost.

But none of that is what I originally meant by “something for everybody.”

After the bombing and before the killing and capture of the suspects, people wondered what sort of person or entity was behind this. Some people were quite loud with their speculation, and every single case of blithering blathering of this sort that I observed had only one message: Arab or Middle Eastern Terrorists did this, bomb them now! The people who wondered if this was domestic terrorism or something else speculated more quietly, often privately. Almost all the conversations I engaged in of this sort during the “manhunt” were in private.

So, the speculation included “Islamic Middle Eastern Terrorist” and “Home grown Timothy McVeigh style terrorist” and my favorite, and to my knowledge I was the only one who said this, “Kids who are jerks and thought this would be rad.”

Turns out everybody was right.

The two terrorist suspects are from the “Middle East” if you define that region somewhat more broadly than is usually done. They were Islamic. But they were also relatively American. And they were two kids who seemed to think this would be rad.

A brief digression for perspective: Those not from working class Greater Boston Area (especially Cambridge, Somerville, Watertown and Belmont) should know that the percentage of average boys and girls one runs into on the street, in the store, or in school who are green-card holding individuals, or who were born in another country, is very large there. Well, in certain neighborhoods it might be low, but not where these folks lived. I lived a few blocks from where the big shootout happened. I once house sat just up the street from the house with the boat in the back yard. I also lived near the Cambridge location where relatives of the bombers lived. And so on. During my time living in the Boston area, my landlords and at least of my immediate neighbors (upstairs, downstairs, or next door) included people not born in the US 100% of the time, with the minor adjustment that although my neighbors near the house with the boat were, I think, all American born, the home owner was from Asia.

The two suspects were also kids who lived in the Boston area who might well have been 4Chaners or Redditers or bloggers (anyone know yet?) and at least one had a twitter account that looked just like a lot of teen age or 20-something dumb-ass MRA’s accounts, nothing special other than being a jerk like a lot of guys are. There is a reasonable chance that religion together with the whole Y-chromosome thing and other factors combined in a bad way with some sort of socio-(or whatevero)-pathy and that if any one of these elements was missing we’d have had a different result. Minor crime sprees, serial date rape, that sort of thing. But the truth is these guys were dumb-ass American dudes with Middle Eastern connections, Islamic religion and something badly wrong with them, but not so badly wrong, necessarily, as to wonder and worry about how easy it is for two dumb-ass dudes to go from being miscreants to murderers.

We don’t really know, yet, who Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev really are/were. The were born in what might be the most obscure of the this-or-that-istans, Kyrgyzstan. That makes them Asians, but since they are ethnic Chechens, putting their heritage in the Caucasus, they are Caucasians! Kyrgystan is a democracy-ish country with Islam as the main religion with a sprinkling of Russian Orthodox. It is a former Soviet state.

Tamerlan shares a name with Timur the Lame (aka Tamerlan), the mongol conquerer who was known as one of the most terrible of the terrible, and had ancestral connections to Genghis Khan. He conquered vast regions and he was the guy who burned down a remote monastery in Georgia, a locality now known as Dmanisi, where important hominid finds were made. I mention this because my daughter has lived and worked at Dmanisis, with her mom, for years, and they were stuck at the airport during the manhunt for namesake Tamerlan. Everything is connected to everything else.

But I digress. The Tsarnaev family moved to the US in 2002. The kids were born in 1993 and 1986, so they spent a fair amount of time in their homeland and also Russia, and a fair amount of time in the US. They were classified as refugees and were permanent residence of the US. They went to Ringe and Latin (I lived in that high school district for a few years … if it wasn’t for Academic Nomadism, Julia would have been Dzhokhar’s classmate). They were each involved in sports of combat in school (wrestling or boxing). One of them went to Bunker Hill for some college. In other words, they were very typical Bostonians.

Except for one or two details, perhaps.

Was it just some kid who thought this would be an outrageoius thing to do?

The bomber used pressure cookers, two of them. Shrapnel was encased in the pressure cookers, I assume using some sort of packing material. Commonly available chemicals were used to make the low grade explosive. The police have hinted (this could be wrong) that they know something of the detonation device. The venue was full of people and many of them possessed cameras and thousands of photographs were taken. There are security cameras. This act was either done by someone who has come and gone and will never be found, or by someone who will be run to ground by the largest law enforcement agency in the world after figuring out the make and model of pressure cooker and where they have been sold, the kind of play-dough used to secure the bb’s and ball bearings, the isotopic signature of the shrapnel and the explosive materials, and the sources of any electronics used in the devices. They will reconstruct the bomber’s shopping list and then investigate every place that list could have been fulfilled. If the bomber is not already gone, after scanning photographs and videos not just of the scene but of every Walmart and Target store that sells pressure cookers and pay-dough and common household items, they will identify the bomber and run him to ground. And when I say “bomber” I mean “bomber or bombers and their associates.”

The horror of this event is shaped like an onion. At the center are the dead, then the maimed, then the walking wounded, then those shocked by the explosion, then those who saw it, or heard it, then the 9000 runners who were not done with the race and were turned back blocks away, and the countless friends and family members at the finish who must have lived anguished hours as they sought out their loved ones with cell phone service overloaded and any plans to use the already confused and chaotic Boston infrastructure to meet up after the race thwarted by the city center closing down, then the people who live in Boston. They, the “Bostonians” (and by that I mean the six million or so who live in the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area including the smallish but dense city itself) were attacked and they can feel that palpably even if they were not near the blast. And, of course, the Americans, and the rest of the world, the outer layers and peel of the onion.

Then there were the people who ran towards the blast, including the first responders. They deserve our accolades but I will not be shy to suggest this: After the attacks on 9/11 2001, first responders and the laws and systems of government they represent were put on too high and too permanent of a pedestal. Osama bin Laden made us fear everything and he made us grant authority too much power. Let’s caution ourselves to not do that this time. We can reward and respect, and meekly thank those who ran towards the blast and those who undeniably saved many lives with their quick action, without losing any more liberty.

Which kind of horror do we prefer this to turn out to be? A kid who thought it would be funny, that’s a horrible thought. A foreign agency, which once discovered could draw us into another endless war with tens of thousands of casualties. That would be horrible. Disaffected Americans full of hate and vitriol, our own people sufficiently deranged by the politics of hate we have allowed to grow, even nurtured, killing innocents instead of just screaming at the children trampling their lawn. That would be its own kind of horror. It would almost be better if we never found out. But of course, we need to find out.

There were people from Newtown Connecticut in the race and watching it, close enough to see the blasts. Many of the racers in this phase of the marathon were those running for causes of various kinds, not the lead racers, not the old guy who finishes last every year under police escort because the race is done but at least he finishes. We wonder if the bomber knew that the blasts would go off while people running to raise money to cure cancer or help the homeless or whatever were going by.

Thousands of people ran away from the blast. Some of them were injured. One man who ran away from the blast site was burned, but he was also brown, and from Saudi Arabia. He got his house searched and he got his interrogation. He will be his own kind of reluctant hero. We hope he holds no ill will, and we can guess that he holds less ill will than the average middle class privileged white male would hold under identical circumstances.

President Obama said there are “no Republicans or Democrats” only citizens. That was wishful thinking. We are already seeing the center and right questioning his use of word, or really, his lack of use of the word “terrorist.” But they should hold their tongues, the angry right. Because this could have been one of them. That would be horrible.

The truthers bring their own horrors to the table, claiming that this event was created by the government in order to get something, but knowing more details of what their argument is means sullying one’s ears, polluting one’s brain. We need to learn to turn away from the truthers the moment we see them coming. They are walking, living, breathing low level acts of terrorism of a kind.

So many Bostonians described the blasts as being “like a cannon going off.” If you are not from Boston, that may sound strange. Who has enough experience hearing cannons going off to know what that sounds like? But that’s Boston. Cannons are frequently fired in the First American City. There are a number of them left over from the old days, kept and maintained and used as very loud alarm clocks or fired off at patriotic events. Bostonians do in fact know what a cannon sounds like when it goes off.

Be good to your fellow humans, your fellow Americans, your friends from Boston, your friends who run marathons and your friends who hear cannons. It is only by chance that they were not ripped asunder by the person who did this thing. This sort of thing has not happened often in this country, and having happened this week does not mean that it will happen often. This means we are lucky, we are not Londoners during the Troubles or citizens of Sarajevo during the siege or Rwandans during the slaughters or Israelis or Palestinians at pretty much any time. But it also means that we are not well prepared to react properly, to adjust reasonably, to act in our own best interest. The attacks on September 11th proved that we are vulnerable to two things: Horrific violent attacks and the aftermath we cause for ourselves by bending to our own desire for authoritarianism, which seems to live inside ourselves right next to our desire for liberty and for just being left alone.

But also, go ahead and be angry.

Photo Credit: hahatango via Compfight cc