A Day of Martial Law

     If you ask a conspiracy theorist about the recent bombing in Boston, one of the first things they may tell you is that it was set up by the government to practice Martial Law. Since I love this country and I have faith in our government to conduct itself fairly and legally, I'm willing to let the first part of that theory go. It is the second part, however, which is causing me to question what happened exactly.
     If there were an untested protocol, a method of conduct for a dangerous situation how would we know it would work? Obviously, such a method must be used in practicum to rule whether or not it will work. In Boston, we saw a very intricate response to the two bombing suspects and it should cause us to think about how necessary it all was.
     For those fateful days in April, people in Boston were asked to stay in their homes and lock their doors while the Federal, State, and local police hunted down the nineteen-year-old suspect. I do not believe any information on the total number of police involved, artillery, and equipment have been released, but judging by the looks of Boston for those days in question, it seems to be overkill for a single person. Yes, it is a dangerous situation and, as an acquaintance pointed out to me earlier, the last thing we would want is a manhunt in Boston's rush-hour traffic. Not to mention, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Governor Patrick, and the state and local police only asked people to stay indoors; that is to say that unless Martial Law was officially declared, the people were allowed to follow their government's suggestion at their own discretion.
     This is what is so worrying to me. The day of and the days following the bombing, we witnessed how people will react to a certain type of response to terror on our own soil. Compared to 9/11, the terror at the Boston Marathon, though tragic, was a minimum; it wasn't the chaos and temporary anarchy that New York was for the weeks following the attack. New York was practically a battlefield while Boston, though in peril, was tame— well, as tame as Boston can be. Had Martial law been declared in both situations, New York would have been next to impossible to control while Boston would have been a cakewalk, and not because Boston is smaller, but because it was compliant with the requests of the government.
     This is not to say that the people should not have been compliant or that they had any reason to distrust their government, though efforts to capture the culprits were drastic and perhaps over the top, it was probably just as easy allowing the police do what they do without getting in their way. My personal concern, however, is that people will grow used to allowing this anytime for anything. We must stand against violence in every form and, in avoidance of siding with either Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X, suffice it to say that violence should be battled with intolerance— however you, the reader, may take that notion.
~Joe

On the Boston Marathon Massacre

     In the twenty-first century, evil hath no face. The general prejudice of Americans— particularly white Americans— causes us to picture brown skinned, turban wearing individuals who believe in Allah (simply Arabic for Yahweh, which is Hebrew for God). 

     Prejudice aside, we have absolutely no idea who is guilty of the terror at the Boston Marathon. Earlier today, I saw a picture of the child who was killed on Boylston Street and I found myself haunted not by the death of a child holding a sign that says "No more hurting people; peace", but by the apathy toward this tragedy and my own struggle with a severe disconnect to the violence. For the sake of brevity, in the case this act of terror is found to come from an individual who is domestic, American born, and perhaps even white, what I propose is that we as Americans are to blame for we have become entirely unmoved by violence and the horror violence creates. 

     It will be easy to condemn a foreign entity with foreign agents of terror, but what are we going to say if it happens to be an American? Furthermore, what are we going to say when we are forced to ask ourselves how different this is from the Colorado Shooting or other atrocities especially if those involved do not suffer from mental health issues, but from indoctrination? 

     A second set of questions: "who do we blame?" and "who do we kill?" The killing cannot stop at Boylston Street if we seek justice as we understand it in the law books  But in a spiritual sense, are we willing to send these individuals to their virgins? Or, if that was not the case, how many should be sent to their deaths to obtain justice for those who have been murdered? The pursuit of justice, in this case, should be inflection and change in our hearts, to stop violence when we see it, and to put a stop to the ever increasing sociopathic tendencies toward violence. We should confront ourselves with these things in the attempt to dissolve them completely. 

     President Obama referred to this attack as a tragedy and he has been hounded by news syndicates to condemn it further, to upgrade it from "tragedy" to something else— an "act of terror" or some such over used, over glorified phrase. That is the problem. We are already so disconnected from the tragedy, we seek to call it something else and to defend it to the end simply because we are becoming less and less able to empathize with the victims. This is a tragedy and people need to get upset over it and grieve for humanity as a whole rather than letting it fuel their prejudices and serve as entertainment to their boredom. 

     In the twenty-first century, evil begets apathy, thus evil reigns with a swift dominance of the globe. It coasts effortlessly like a feather in a vacuum gives way to Earth's gravity. The compassion we once had as a species, though still present in certain circumstances, was once a friction to violence and the evil born from it.

~ Joe