Blood and Candy

It was the strangest little fragment of information, lost in the thicket of coverage of the horrific shootings at the Kenya Mall.

The al-Shabaab attackers had herded a group of women and children into a room at gunpoint.  They were held there for a while, and then released.  When they were let go, the gunmen made a gesture:  they handed candy to the children.  Look!  We are your friends!  We're not so bad!  We're giving you candy!  Yum, delicious candy from your friends who really are very nice and are not going to kill you right now the way you thought they might!

All of those children had just watched as an outing had turned into a horrific, traumatic bloodbath.  They may have seen adults, adults they knew, shot and killed.  They'd been forced into a room by the gun wielding men who were responsible for instigating that terror.

And candy makes that better?  In the minds of the assailants, clearly it did.  "We are good and noble, the defenders of a great and terrible truth.  Yes, we must inflict pain, but that is only because we must.  We will hand out candy so that all will know that we are really the good guys."

That level of disconnect from what is real, from the actuality of what is being done, it can only be described as madness.  Human beings are horribly gifted at that, at becoming so lost in the thickets of their own patterns of thinking that they can no longer stand in meaningful encounter with the real.

From that place, steeped in the idolatry of our thoughts and imaginings, we most easily inflict harm on other beings.

It is not only Somali terrorists who do this.

Terror

I was disconnecting our too-costly cable yesterday, the five-hundred channels of nothing that we kept around as a pillow of media luxury in the fat years.  As I crated up the top box to return, I turned on broadcast to see if it still worked.

It did.  I almost wish it had not.

There, with the graphics blood red, were the images of Boston.  Smoke and fire, explosions, the runners falling, clutching their shattered eardrums.  First responders, already there, running.  In the smoke, figures flailing, flame-blackened ghosts in tattered clothing.  I switched among the old networks, and they all were the same.

I watched for a while, long enough to feel sick and angry, and to think of my wife and her running.  I've been there at the finish time enough.  Then the data stream started cycling, the same pattern of images, the same vision of horror, repeated and reinforced.  Professional talkers and thinkers appeared, to talk and think about the things that we had all seen.  But there was nothing more to know.

I checked my social media feeds, and they were suddenly brimming with prayers and fears for friends.

There was nothing more I needed to know, nothing that I could not glean later when there was actually more to know.

I shut it all down.  The television?  Off.  The media feeds and apps?  Away from my eyes.

 Lingering over such things feels like a sickness, a sickness that consumes soul and mind with horror.  It is a form of anxiety, this collective gnawing over the unknown and unknowable.  I have succumbed to that in past, because it is so easy to do.  Twenty-four-hour news cycle-profit-driven media and social media both magnify our fear, like we are trapped animals screaming in a steel-walled room.  And fear is the only goal of whatever blighted soul did this monstrous thing.

I drove the little guy to his drum lesson, and then, my smartphone off and forced into the silence of my pocket, I walked and thought and prayed.

Then home, where I prepared dinner for the family.  Then, an evening with my wife, watching Lincoln.

I will not be fear-full.

Mirandized

Our societal takeaway from the recent failed Times Square bombing attempt is a teensy bit troubling. Following an unbelievably amateurish effort to detonate explosives, Faisal Shahzad was arrested on an aircraft. He apparently was quite the chatterbox, 'fessin' up almost enthusiastically. As Shahzad is a citizen of the United States, he was informed of his Miranda rights...meaning his rights under the Constitution. He kept on talkin', as getting attention was probably his hope all along. Probably something to do with getting back at his father, I'd surmise.

No citizen can be forced to incriminate themselves, and every citizen has the right to legal counsel. This little list of rights has been hammered into our heads. As pretty much every American TV show that's not reality TV is a cop/legal/courtroom drama, the Miranda statement is something we're all familiar with.

It's a given.

Or was, if things roll the way they seem to be rolling. Right wingers are, as they always are, outraged that Shahzad was read his Miranda rights. He's a terrorist! He doesn't deserve his Miranda rights! He stopped being a citizen the moment he decided to Wage War On America! There's much huffing and posturing and indignation, resulting in the possibility that terror suspects who "pose an imminent threat" may no longer be Mirandized. This, we are told, is an extension of the public safety exception, which allows suspects to be detained and questioned without being informed of their rights. This stirs all sorts of thoughts, but two in particular:

First, I'm not sure what actually constitutes a "public safety exception." Strong evidence pointed to Shahzad's culpability, sure. But he wasn't in the process of setting off a bomb. He wasn't at the scene of a crime immediately after its commission. He was on an airplane, sitting on his behind. So here is a citizen, who is the primary suspect in an investigation. He is arrested. He is read his rights, which he may then choose to act on...or not. Reading his rights to him did not, in any way that I can see, negatively impact public safety.

Second, and more significant, there are the implications of applying a "public safety exception" to American citizens who are terror suspects. Yeah, nobody likes a terrorist. But if a citizen is suspected of being involved in or plotting a terror attack, revoking their rights as a citizen in the name of "public safety" seems a very dangerous precedent. The danger, quite frankly, not the removal of that little script. Rather, it is the threat that seems to pose to the rights that underlie Miranda. Let's fast forward eight years to the Palin/Cuccinelli Administration. If you or I were implicated as possible terrorists, should we be stripped of our rights as citizens? You know, rights like not being indefinitely detained? Or not being [cough] encouraged to incriminate ourselves during the process of that indefinite detention? Or having the right to counsel and a speedy trial?

My sense of this is that some on the law-and-order right would be perfectly happy to have this be the case. It's all in the interests of public safety, you know.