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Blog Open Thread– Your Reactions and Reflections on the Boston Marathon Bombing and the past week
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So many things hit you one hardly knows where to start.
I am so thankful for the police and local Massachusetts leaders who did their job.
I am so aware of the importance of the gift of life.
The degree to which people do not understand the nature of humanness that the reactions to what occurred reveals remains stunning….
I think what really made an impression was how the major TV networks, CNN, Fox, MSNBC have lost track of reality and how much information and real investigation is really being done at the social media level:
1. The amount of misinformation on what was going on, particularly in the “mainstream” media which didn’t particularly seem to care about the accuracy or timeliness of what they were reporting. Just one example, CNN and other sources kept on posting for hours about the first suspect being “arrested, strip-searched and taken into custody” when the live stream cameras filming the events you could view on the internet clearly showed Suspect No. 1 lying dead in the middle of the street.
2. The fact that “social media” reporting in many ways was much more accurate and up to date than what was being reported by the mainstream media. If you went to forum sites, you got pretty much instantaneous updating from people who were tweeting or posting on forums. You had folks posting videos taken out their window of the shots being fired, others showing SWAT officers going across their yards and on top of their tool sheds, and one guy even posted a picture of a bullet hole through his wall and through his desk chair. The downside was that there were a lot of wild rumors, as well as trolls and people intentionally posting misinformation, but you could sort through that pretty quickly.
3. The fact that, if you wanted to, you could follow a lot of this instantaneously on the internet. At one point I had three local Boston tv networks going live on my computer, plus playing the police scanner and looking at social media streams. So I was pretty much seeing it as it happened.
4. CNN was particularly clueless about what was actually happening–their reporting was hours out of date and inaccurate in most respects. But then all of a sudden they came out and announced the identities of the terrorists, right out of the blue. Pretty much tells me that they weren’t really doing any of their own work, but then just got fed the information from someone pretty high in the power structure. Also disturbing.
This tragedy exposed even more starkly the raw edge of partisan ideology which has infected our country. Within an hour or two of the explosions, CNN and MSNBC were reporting that the bombers “had to be right wingers”. The Salon prayed that it would be a white conservative male. The President was advising “no rush to judgement”, even though he had just performed another spectacle of rushing to judgement in the Rose Garden after his gun control bills were defeated in the Senate.
The local cops, on the ground FBI, and others at the scene did a magnificent job. But, what message are we sending to the jihadists when a whole, major American city can be locked down under martial law when one terrorist is on the loose?
And what of the departed Saudi? What did Michelle Obama discuss with him in private in the hospital? Was it related to the Saudi minister’s visit to Mr. Obama?
We Americans take care of ourselves at the local leve well. But things emanating from Washington are all tainted with something not quite right.
I admire and respect the various law enforcement agencies who did their job well, at considerable personal risk. May God heal the wounded officer and receive the souls of those murdered, and comfort their families. News reports are now saying a sleeper cell is being sought; I hope all involved are arrested before more violence occurs.
Like many, I suspected Islamists from the first, because of the nature of the bomb and the operation, but I did wait until suspects were identified before settling on that cause. Perhaps the various legacy media people who embarrassed themselves with wild speculations might consider waiting for evidence.
As expected, CAIR and other Muslim advocacy groups are saying it has “nothing to do with Islam.” I have Muslim acquaintances and friends, and they are not all violent, of course. I would respect these advocacy groups if they could only face the fact that it does have to do with a version of Islam which is approved by the standard Islamic jurisprudences and is followed by large numbers of Muslims today. This cancer can only be treated by the Muslims themselves, from within their own families and mosques — if they will.
We all knew, after 9/11/01, that we are at risk in the U.S. Many of these plots have been uncovered and stopped before anything happened. It’s not possible to stop them all, sadly. Along with calls for Muslims to reform their own communities, as Christians we need to renew and strengthen our own families and churches against the trials to come — and to prepare ways to reach, perhaps, some of these angry young Muslims with God’s love and grace before they stain their souls with barbaric acts.
I forgot to mention that my husband took his 1969 Triumph to a motorcycle show yesterday. Next to him was an Afghanistan veteran who lost both legs there, showing his modified Harley tricycle. He wanted to keep on riding. What happened to him, an IED, is exactly what happened to people in Boston last Monday. Evil is not confined to distant locations; it’s here, too.
I was struck with a great sense of sadness – sadness at the lives cut short, for the injured and maimed who will have to live without limbs or worse, for their families and for those who were not injured but who saw such terrible sights which will haunt them as bystanders, emergency workers, medical staff and policemen. God bless them and grant them healing along with an awareness of His presence. There was a silence before the London Marathon today and there were a lot of black arm bands worn.