Painful Questions

How do we talk about the Boston marathon murders in a way that acknowledges the suffering and the evil, yet also places them within the broader perspective of suffering and evil that the human race has experienced, and is currently experiencing, on a far too frequent basis? I think this is an essential task that will take a lot of sensitivity and careful reflection.

Unfortunately, all too often it feels like there’s a zone of silence erected around these terrorist acts against Americans, and you push through this psychological barrier at your own peril. The silence hurts us all. There are so many legitimate questions we need to ask, publicly, without fear of censure or damaging accusations of anti-Americanism.

Let me be clear: I’m as horrified as everyone else by the killings and maimings; my heart aches for the victims and their loved ones; and I understand the symbolic significance of this kind of attack. I also agree with the consensus that this was an attack on the nation itself. I recognize that such attacks tear at the fabric of our cultural and historic values.

 We all want to know why and how the Tsarnaev brothers did the terrible things they are accused of doing. We need this information to prevent future attacks and to punish the perpetrators. Yes. Yes. But… or perhaps I should say “And” – I have other questions that need answers, too, and I want to be able to pose them without hurting the victims and their families or being accused of being anti-American merely for asking them.

For example,

• I want to know how we’ve reached a place in our political discourse where a group of respected, long-serving senators can propose prosecuting a U.S. citizen, whose crimes (still alleged, I feel obliged to note) were committed on U.S. soil, as an enemy combatant?
• I want to know what, in broad terms, is the imminent threat that prevents us from reading Dzokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights. I want to know if Jared Loughner and John Holmes were read their Miranda rights and, if they were, what level of proof was needed to be satisfied in their cases that they were acting alone and hadn’t planned additional, imminent attacks that would have merited waiving Miranda rights?
• It’s being said that the Tsarnaev brothers were culturally and legally “from” both America and Chechnya. In fact, the majority of post-9/11 attacks (such as the London bombings in 2005) were similarly ‘semi-homegrown’ episodes carried out by people who were raised in, or citizens of, the pluralistic countries they attacked and not explicitly connected to larger, international terror networks. I want to know how in the future we will we decide who is and isn’t “one of us”? And how will that determination affect how we respond to acts of mass violence?  How will it influence how we prosecute a crime, the penalty we seek, and the surrounding cultural and political issues we choose to emphasize?
• What kind of conditions are necessary to try a federal death penalty case in a non-death penalty state? Since this case will be prosecuted at the federal, not state, level; and since Massachusetts does not allow the death penalty, I want to know who will make the decision to seek the death penalty, as is widely assumed will be done, and how. Usually (but not always) the feds will defer to the states if the latter prohibit executions.
• The Boston marathon bombings have been repeatedly described this week as the “worst attack on U.S. soil since 9/11.” This may come as news to the victims and citizens of Tucson, Arizona; Aurora, Colorado; and Newtown, CT. I want to know when – if ever –  we will have an honest discussion about the kinds of mass homicide we and our elected officials are/are not willing to tolerate as the price of democracy. What kinds of mass homicide merit infringements on civil liberties? Which ones do not? Is there a scenario where we would shut down a city to find the perpetrator of a different kind of mass homicide, such as the Newtown attack on an American elementary school, arguably an equally potent symbol of our values?

I hope we can all keep asking questions with sensitivity, of course, but without fear or shame. One of the American values I cherish most deeply is the right and obligation to question.

Who You Gonna Call In A Crisis?

Fertilizer plant explosion, West, Texas (photo: Fox News)

I want to return to my “Big Fat American Government” piece I posted a couple days ago. I think the horrific explosion at a fertilizer plant in the town of West, Texas is a chilling counterpoint to the kind of government response that worked so well in the aftermath of the Boston marathon bombings. What happened in Texas  is what can happen to people in states where folks claim they don’t want government meddling in their lives. The deadly explosion was the result, in part, of a malignant glorification of rugged individualism that imposes deep costs to actual rugged individuals. And, parenthetically, that ‘Get Government Off My Back’ meme is the worst kind of straw man; no one really wants government meddling, not even the people and corporations receiving public welfare. But sometimes we need it. This is from the New York Times opinion page and the author describes the Texas debacle better than I could:

The explosion in West, which killed at least 14 people, is now entering a dark pantheon of events in Texas, ones that will surely lead to debates in the state about government regulation and oversight — or the lack thereof. About what “public safety” really means, implies, entails. About Texas’ passionate history of pushing back at what some see as big-government intrusion — a trend that traces back to the regulation-free days of wildcatting in the oil patches.

As before, there will be demands that Texas be willing to scrutinize companies so tragedies like the one in West never occur again. But if history is any guide, lawmakers and officials will still err on the side of industry and less so on the side of public safety. And there will be another West in the years to come.

My Big Fat American Government

Hey, props to Boston! Taxachusetts, I heart you. Gimme some B-I-G government!

O big/bloated/corrupt government-shunners, O bombastic, ignorant Tea partiers, O federal trough-slopping hypocrites… come on, just admit it. Didn’t we all see this week what robust public investments in health, safety, and education really look like?  For those just tuning in, loss of life at the Boston Marathon was dramatically minimized on Monday because Boston’s security and medical teams and other first responders were so superbly prepared for a disaster. The EMTs knew how to use tourniquets to prevent catastrophic blood loss and were able to triage the patients expertly so that everyone got the necessary care. This saved countless lives, as we’ve all read; people were moments from death and would have died had they been languishing, even for a couple extra minutes, waiting for medical care. (Remember Princess Diana stuck in that tunnel for 30 minutes? Never woulda happened here in Boston.)

And how about those amazing teaching hospitals? I hope no one is stupid enough to think they’re the best in the world merely through the kindness of private donors. On the contrary – very much ‘on the contrary’ – Boston has top-ranked hospitals because of massive, ongoing public investments in basic and applied research, in education, and in training. (Not to mention its universities and colleges – all publicly supported to varying degrees – that feed into the medical system and, below that rung, its top-ranked K-12 schools that likewise provide the backbone of excellent labor in this city, and for visitors across the globe.) Kaching!$ It’s expensive to run such a tight ship. But the costs pay huge dividends, not only in our comparatively higher salaries and health statistics, but, as we saw this week, literally in ‘life and limb.’

Sara Palin can laugh all she wants about federal funding for fruit fly research, but how many of us would even be here today if it weren’t for our illustrious history of public investment in medical research. It’s scandalous that Congress has decimated the budgets for the National Institutes of Health. Forget obesity; this is the real silent epidemic! Imagine the consequences – decades from now – of just folding up the tent on medical research. Do we really want the soft drink industry filling the breach? (Maybe we should hedge our bets and go vegan.)

And surely the freak show at MIT and in Watertown, which I heard unfolding out my window, would likely have been much worse with a less skilled, less comprehensive response. Anyone listening in to the live police feed, as I did, would have been impressed by the professionalism of the Boston law enforcement apparatus. They were pretty cool customers.

Big government has a bad rep for some good reasons. Fine, I get it. But can we be honest for a second? What kind of government do we really want? A puny, enfeebled government? Hello, New Orleans! How do you think things would have gone down this week in one of those red states that doesn’t like to invest adequately in its people? Florida? Mississippi? Nevada? Take your pick. I’m not trying to bash other Americans, just stating facts here. We all need big government and it’s a fiction to pretend otherwise, though plenty of people do, as this handy graphic will illustrate:

According to the  Tax Foundation, take a look at which states (in red) benefit from federal tax and spending policies, and which states (in blue) foot the bill.

“The report shows that of the 32 states (and the District of Columbia) that are “winners” — receiving more in federal spending than they pay in federal taxes —  17 of the 20 (85%) states receiving the most federal spending per dollar of federal taxes paid are Red States.”

But don’t want to get too political about this. It’s a human issue, not a conservative or liberal one. It’s not about red states and blue states. It doesn’t have to be. All societies need public investments to spur growth. And in case we need a reminder, our handy constitution tells us so:

We the People  of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America (emphasis, mine).

It’s right there, but we get so focused on the personal liberty stuff that we sometimes forget the “general welfare” and “common defense” parts of the equation.

But Bostonians didn’t forget, not this week. Not our doctors and nurses and emergency responders. Not the Marathon organizers. Not the runners. Not the patients in their hospital beds who woke up surprised to be alive, not dead. Not my frightened students who were hunkered down all night with their laptops and phones, checking the latest developments.

“We the people” is so much more than a call for individual freedom. It’s a reminder that where liberty is concerned, the whole is often greater than the sum of its parts. Some of our most prized freedoms are supported by the scaffolding of government. It’s awfully nice to stand on a soap box, like our spineless politicians did earlier this week, and shun the trappings of big government.

Some of us don’t have that luxury.

The Little State That Could (or: More Warm Fuzzies for Mass-holes)

I’m re-posting something I wrote last year, about my home state, that seems especially appropriate today. Enjoy. (I hope it goes without saying that I’m not trying to make light of recent events, but I am thinking rather fondly about Massachusetts.)

Every time I drive my nephew out to Western MA, I laugh out loud at signs like “Belchertown,” so I thought you’d enjoy this list of mostly fake Massachusetts town names:

Lameham
Methol
Shamesbury
Blight Falls
Mansocket
Whitefolk
Leominsterlingburghamshireton
Scroughton
Unstable (/unst’-a-bull/)
Hamham
Braintree

O, Massachusetts! You get such a bad rap. Taxachusetts. Whitey Bulger. Marshmallow Fluff. The Boston Strangler. The busing riots. That embarrassing Plimouth Rock episode.  It’s all so indefensible, really. The Big Dig. Southie, before it became trendy. Southie, after it became trendy. All those wack-job sports fans. The cheapskates. The laughing-stock accents. The “massholes” mouthing off about their bright “i-dears” and their “potty plattahs” and “spidah monkey cahcasses.” The great white sharks who’ve set up real estate on the Vineyard (because you saved the seals, you idiot conservationists.)

And how about Mitt Romney and his evil scheme to improve people’s health with a plan that has broad bipartisan support? (Honestly, the nerve of that man.)

And you don’t think I’d forget to mention the heartbreaking beauty of our ‘changing seasons’ – all in one day – do you? Or the psycho drivers on the hairpin, moon cratered “turnpikes?” If you haven’t had the pleasure yet, I can recommend the fun family bonding experience of teaching your kid to drive on a highway with on and off ramps a yard apart and drivers who think turning signals are vestigial organs. Good times!

But the thing is, “Mass,” I just can’t quit you. Every time I wonder how I could possibly hate my shitty state more, this inexplicable little glow starts worming its way into my heart, and the rationalizations start piling on.

A Boston Patriot

(Update: I just learned that the sister of one of our dining hall workers here at Harvard College was among the victims. My heart goes out to her devastated family.)

The Shot heard ’round the world. The cry, too. My deepest sympathies to those poor souls and their familis who lost ‘life and limb’ yesterday in Boston.

A lot of people outside Massachusetts don’t realize that yesterday was “Patriots Day,” a state holiday celebrating the battles of Lexington and Concord that marked the beginning of the Revolutionary War. For many of us, however, Patriots Day is simply the yearly excuse to enjoy Marathon Monday. It’s impossible to overstate – and I won’t try – the significance of the Boston Marathon to a certain (large) segment of the state’s population. It seems to represent, as much as a centuries-old battle ever could, the brawny, tough-minded, workaday spirit of New Englanders. The kind of New Englanders who run marathons. I love that you have to actually qualify to run in the Boston Marathon. “Don’t waste my time, you friggin’ losah!” seems to be the prevailing attitude about other, less discriminating marathons. Yet there are plenty of Boston marathon loopholes for good-deeders who lag in time but not generosity. You can sign up as a charity team. For the Children’s Hospital, for example, where yesterday’s youngest murder victims were transported. 

Quite honestly, and I don’t mean to veer off topic here, it’s always greatly irritated me how people from other parts of the country, especially during election years, look down on New Englanders, and especially the Massachusetts genus, as not fully realized flesh-and-blood Americans. We’re too weird, too aggressive, too liberal blah blah. We swear too much and go to church too little. (I could toss around our lower divorce rates and our top-rated public school system which, if we were a nation, would put us ahead of all those educational powerhouses we wring our hands about.)

But let’s not get into a pissing match, shall we? The point is I’ve always thought New Englanders were the real deal, as real as anyone else. Surely our history counts for something. Surely it marks our cultural DNA in some way. I felt that way on September 11th, when I found myself (like many others) inexplicably drawn to the Old North Bridge for a moment of reflection. Maine, the only other state that celebrates Patriots Day, has sent more soldiers to their deaths from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, on a per capita basis, than the other forty-nine.

Growing up in Concord MA, my family always attended the Patriots Day parade, not the marathon. There was a geographic divide, and if you were from one of the western suburbs out Route 2, you did the tricorn hat shtick and watched the marathon later in the day, on TV. I was 12 during the American bicentennial celebration when President Gerald Ford came to Concord; the street was mobbed and I didn’t catch even a brief glimpse of his measly motorcade. At one point, the crowd pressed down so hard on me and my friend that we were backed into a low stone wall at the edge of an old cemetery – the old settlers’ burial ground with the rubbed out, lichen-strewn head stone marking the deaths, on the same date, of “Mother and Child.” No names, just the haunting reminder of early American maternal and child mortality.

The only thing I recall with any distinctness about that Patriots Day was seeing an agitated old lady fall backwards off her perch on the wall. (Only her pride seemed injured.) Later, we claimed that she had “soiled” her underpants and we screamed with revulsion as we regaled our friends. I don’t even know anymore if such a person existed.

Patriots Day Lemonade stand, Concord MA

I raised my three kids in Concord, too, and I remember when they were little and we were still trying to impart life’s lessons with a prayer of something actually sticking, my heretofore un-enterprising children seized an opportunity to make an easy buck and set up a lemonade stand on our sidewalk, which by happy coincidence was the Old Battle Road on which the (retreating) British soldiers and (advancing) Minute Men had passed 200-plus years prior. There’s a spot not far from our old house called the “Bloody angle” where the fighting was especially intense. And another nearby place where unknown British army ‘regulars’ are buried about whom a poet wrote movingly:

They came three thousand miles, and died,

To keep the Past upon its throne:

Unheard, beyond the ocean tide,

Their English mother made her moan.

Concord, MA. North Bridge

WW2 Cemetery, Bangladesh

I’ve always felt so sorry for those young men who’d left everything familiar behind and surely had no real apprehension of what they were doing, or why. I had a similar feeling years ago – decades ago – when I wandered alone in a monsoon rain through a British World War II cemetery in Comilla, Bangladesh. There were rows and rows of graves of young men. 19, 20, 21 years-old. Boys whose English mothers moaned. The age of my own boys. Sappers. It took me years to hear that word again and learn what their deadly job required.

And yesterday: more bombs, closer to home. I’m fighting this urge to put everything in perspective. 26 people were murdered in Chicago last week. Where’s the outcry? Where are the tears? 3,500 people in America have been shot to death by guns since the Newtown travesty. And dare I state another uncomfortable truth? Where’s the outcry for those children just killed by drone strikes? When the hell did drones become the new normal? And just today: a non-partisan report from the Constitution Project, confirming our historically unprecedented use of torture in the U.S., and specifically the

“…considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody (that)…damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.”

Every murder is a travesty. But it is a fact that some murders are more symbolically painful than others. Yesterday, in Boston, we felt that terrible, terrible pain.

But I hope that our collective (and individual) sorrow won’t turn us into the wrong kind of people, the wrong kind of Americans. I hope it won’t make us respond in ugly, reactionary, counter-productive ways. I hope it won’t turn our fear against us. And most of all, I hope it won’t dull that indomitable, fair-minded, sanguine and, yes, patriotic New England spirit. It’s a spirit rooted in our deep, abiding respect for human life and dignity.

Use Your Words

“Words are supposed to hurt. That’s considered a legitimate way of fighting things out. And what did it replace in the historical scene? It replaced actual violence.

Words are supposed to be free so we CAN actually fight things out, in the battle place of ideas, so we don’t end up fighting them out in civil wars. If we try to legitimately ban anything that can hurt someone’s feelings, everyone is reduced to silence.”

- Greg Lukianoff, president of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate

Next Tuesday evening, Mr. Lukianoff is coming to speak with our students at Harvard and I’m hoping we’ll have a lively debate. But I’m a little worried we won’t. Let me explain:

How to Survive an Attack

There’s something grimly understated about this article from the NYT on how to survive a mass homicide attack. Apparently, we now have a large enough sample size from these shootings to talk intelligently about predictors of survival:

Research on mass shootings over the last decade has bolstered the idea that people at the scene of an attack have a better chance of survival if they take an active stance rather than waiting to be rescued by the police, who in many cases cannot get there fast enough to prevent the loss of life.

In an analysis of 84 such shooting cases in the United States from 2000 to 2010, for example, researchers at Texas State University found that the average time it took for the police to respond was three minutes.

“But you see that about half the attacks are over before the police get there, even when they arrive quickly,” said J. Pete Blair, director for research of the university’s Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center.

On the one hand, great, we should know what to do during an attack! It’s nice to know that our natural fight-or-flight response shouldn’t be muffled in a catastrophe. (And I wonder what those poor, poor souls on September 11th, who obediently returned to their desks after being given the all-clear, probably against their better judgment, might have done with this advice). But isn’t it incredibly depressing that we have this newly comprehensive ‘body’ of evidence about the toll of mass homicide? And why, exactly, is it so much easier to talk about the known risk factors that make a person a victim, rather than a perpetrator?

Gun violence is decreasing, fyi. I think that really needs to be said. Murders are at their lowest rate in four decades, as are other forms of violence and sexual assault. Gun ownership is actually decreasing in America, too. People on both sides of the gun debate don’t want to admit this, but people are less interested in guns than they were even a decade ago. 70 percent of Americans don’t own a gun. (I guess that’s probably horrifying if you’re European, but it represents a pretty overlooked decline in gun ownership amidst all the debate. Of course the 30 percent is busily preparing for Armageddon)

And yet… I think the decline is even more of an argument to understand the conditions under which people do go on murderous sprees. We still have far too many firearms deaths – a truly freakish proportion compared to most industrialized nations – and mass homicides seem especially intractable. Frankly, I’m so sick and tired of locking people up and throwing away the key. Why can’t we treat what is wrong with them before they go on these rampages? Why can’t we compile, and publicize, an unimpeachably clear picture of the factors that promote or inhibit gun violence? Why can’t we figure this out?

Here’s a clue: for 15 years, Congress has prohibited the Centers for Disease Control from funding research on the epidemiology of gun violence. Here’s a dictionary definition of epidemiology: “the study of the distribution and determinants of health related states (i.e. death by gun violence)  in human populations. That’s right, folks, our Congress, the one with the nine percent approval rating, the one that mocks the use of federal dollars for “wasteful” scientific research on fruit flies (a building block of most of the medical advances anyone’s every heard of), that Congress halted all research on the causes and consequences of gun violence because they were in thrall to a paranoid and reckless gun lobby. 

You can find some of my apparently ‘explosive’ commentary on this topic at TIME.com here, here, and here.