Monday, May 6, 2013

Oversimplifying of "Boston Strong" and alot of sidebar thoughts

The debris and smoke have subsided and been swept clear following what has been described as a nightmare by many as two bombs went off during the Boston marathon. 

Immediately hysteria erupted as fight-or-flight stimuli kicked into the the 27,000 participants and observers alike.

One man, running erratically just as everyone else around him, was tackled to the ground, blood flowing from the shrapnel wound in his leg.  He would later become the first victim of media lynch mobs allegedly responsible for the horrible Boston terror that befouled the beautiful day in the eyes of TV screens across the nation.  Hospital staff recounted that within hours, people were arriving to the hospital doors with baseball bats, ready to serve justice to this suspect the FBI had in custody, only to find shortly after he was not in FBI custody, merely being treated for the wounds that hundreds of others in attendance suffered from.  He was a Saudi Arabian exchange student who had every reason to fear for his life.  Not because of fatal shrapnel wounds, but because of the potential fatal repercussion that come with his ethnic identity.

He was just a marathon participant.  A very unfortunate one, with brown skin.  One Saudi Arabian foreign exchange student (out of two that I know of) whose apartment was searched and raided within a day of the Boston terror.

A couple days later, a class of 30-ish Saudi Arabian Bostonian students would be informed during their ESL class to refrain from speaking Arabic publically for their own safety.  You see, a plane was diverted from the Boston tarmac back to the concourse.  Two men were speaking Arabic to each other and other passengers informed a stewardess they didn't feel comfortable being on the same flight. 

After much hublah, FBI agents boarded the plane and left with the two men in custody.  But the reprieve was short lived for the passengers, as the agents released the two men from their custody in only minutes, and the two Arab men boarded the plane once more.  A little more hublah among the other passengers, and the two men were requested to board another flight by the aircrew.  They must have been too brown.

Apparently, not many Bostonians felt comfortable sharing the same slab of concrete to walk on either.  Following the Boston bombings, a Muslim woman in a hijab was assaulted physically and verbally.  As other passerby's watched with indifference.

Erik Rush, Fox News contributor and correspondent took to twitter to vent declaring "[Muslims are] evil. Kill them all."  Fox News and much of its ilk, I'm sure, appreciate Erik's disgusting islamophobia.  Hell, I'm sure much of America did.  Any search through twitter and facebook will reveal the ugly face of racism and islamophobia.

A tragedy befell Boston, but what many media outlets and patriotic Americans alike are missing out on are the hate rhetoric and racism.  We prefer the rose-colored lens of "Boston Strong" and how the communities have all come together.  It's easy to forget Arab's are apart of that community when they're shutting the blinds and locking themselves inside when a public lynch mob is in session.

Live CNN footage broadcasted a celebration that looked like a block party with Bostonians jumping and rejoicing over the capture of one known live suspect.  There were some blacks, some asians, but on a second look, absolutely no one who looked remotely of Arab descent.  We can't blame that on Ramadan yet.

In fact, in most of the media, the only time someone of Arab ethnicity received spotlight was when internet lynch mobs start circulating pictures on the web of random brown skinned men as suspects for no other reason than, well, being brown skinned.  A brown family whose son has been missing for over a month had his charming smile posted on all sorts of internet outlets, alleging he is wanted by the FBI, and further humiliating his already grieving family, when there was no such information disclosed by any agencies of the sort.  A highschool student avoided going to school for an entire week because of death threats in his locker.  Many brown families reported feelings of isolation in their "Boston strong" neighborhood.  What is also strong is the invisibility they have received of everything except knee-jerk condemnation from the media, the citizens, and the nation as a whole.

America can procalim "Boston Strong" until it hurts to swallow, or until their checking account reads insufficient funds at the vendor who's cashing in millions from Boston Strong tee's, or until they realize the Boston Strong concert that has already sold out has more of the profit going into the pocket of the executive and shareholders than the actual city itself.

Trademarking and capitalism are as patriotic as ever whenever a great disaster befalls us, perpetrated by the "other".  The Sandy Hook shooting perpetrator was a crazy white person with a gun.  It touched the nations heart when innocent children were murdered in cold blood.  But he was an "American", not the "other" in a geopolitical sense.  Timothy Mcveigh was a lefty high on lunacy.  But still, totally white (which is a subject for anther time; the Tsaernaev brothers being literally "caucasian", from the Caucuses).  Totally American.  The theatre shooting catapulted an interesting national discussion on gun control, only digging the pro-gun and anti-gun advocates so deep in their trenches that they were nearly shoveling into the ground the families of the victims of the mass shooting were grieving in.  The Sikh Temple shooting?  A sikh?  You mean like undercooked chicken?  No, I mean like the white supremist who killed and injured worshippers in a temple he presumed to be a mosque; a new kind of totally ignorant racism.  Where you hate so much, you don't even know what it is you hate.  But Sikhs wear turbans, and 'Merica doesn't like those.  So it's kind of ok that the mass shooting spree was hardly reported in the mainstream media.  The shooter was an American actually eliminating cultural, religious, and geopolitical "others".  Literally.  Take a second to consider what is implied simply based off of what gets a headline.  It is disturbing to me when I take these examples and more into consideration and struggle to make sense of how to side step around a conclusion (that I could go more in depth on) that America simply does not like "certain people".  To the mainpoint, none of these instances allowed for a "kumbayah" come togetherness against a foreign "other".  Instead, they actually allowed Americans to grieve, except for the case at the Sikh Temple inwhich I imagine their community was the only one grieving.

But no matter how "strong" we believe Boston to be, a microcosm of America's tenacity, what remains stronger is our reluctance to confront our differences, our racism, and how our "American" identity is still marred by benchmarks that are 100 years old.

The feigning of patriotism that comes with "boston strong" allows us to cover up cultural issues and ignore indepth discussions about what it means to be "American". 

Buy some wristbands, rock out at the concert.  Maybe Kid Rock will sign your shirt after he shares some thoughtful words about love, compassion, and togetherness.  Stay Boston Strong.  Just don't be blind that the fear of your neighbor is even stronger, America.

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