Bad Craziness in Boston

Late one night, several moons ago, I found myself on the cold, barren expanses of the Syria-Lebanon border, in the middle of a decrepit, cinderblock shack without windows. On this particular instance, the “immigration” lanes were crowded with armed troops, disinterested looking military types stamping passports, and the queues were overflowing with cross-border travelers, mostly Syrian workers going back to make their bones in Lebanon, a tradition in this part of the world.

In the middle of this bureaucratic ritual, I encountered a somewhat bizarre sight; a 6'4ish Ginger standing amongst the generally shorter, and darker complected crowd. This character looked like someone you'd run into having hashbrowns and whiskey at the Oxford Saloon in Missoula, Mont., not someone you'd expect to see out here. Thinking it was another American, I started up a conversation. Being in Syria, it had been a long time since I had run into someone who spoke good English.

“Hey man, how in the hell did you get here?” I inquired in my road wearied state.

My greeting was returned with a blank stare, like one who has no idea whether or not to shit or go blind, followed by rants in Arabic. Clearly, he wasn't at the Oxford last Friday. It turned out he was from Jordan, spoke little English, and was on his way to manage an internet cafe in Beirut.

Though my diatribe may seem as if it has no point, it does. We can't always judge people by what they look like. This was illustrated with my experience on the Syrian Frontier. Just because someone looks like something, doesn't mean that they necessarily are. Hell, here I thought the guy was someone I could swap stories about drinking Oly and being cat-called at by drunken, sloppy women. Instead, he was a complete foreigner, someone who had little in common with the bar denizens of Higgins Street, even though he looked like he could definitely play the part.

This may seem simplistic, but nowhere was this more prevalent than the aftermath of this past week's Boston Marathon bombings. The blood was still fresh on Boylston Street, the explosions and chaos still freshly ringing in Bostonian ears, and already, people were jumping to conclusions about who did it, and why they did it. Within minutes of the bombings, the armchair Defense ministers set the Twittersphere ablaze with rampant speculation. It was a gun nut, protesting tax day! It was Al-Qaeda! These theories and myriad more set the tone. On websites like Reddit, would-be gumshoes had a field day looking for suspicious looking brown people within the crowd, doing pen drawings on pictures that would have made John Madden proud, and creating suspects, based solely on the fact they looked Middle Eastern or South Asian.

A Saudi national was arrested. He was deported rather suddenly. Evidence, conspiracy theorists maintain, that this was part of a government plot and his deportation part of the cover up.

The mainstream news was no better than this array of crackpots, perhaps even worse, on many occasions putting on ranting talking heads on the various opinion shows, talking heads who asserted it had to be some sort of Iranian plot, or how it was the Al-Qaeda's Malian arm, trying to exact revenge for US support of France in the Mali Campaign.

And now, in the end, it looks to have been the work of two Kyrgyz-Chechen immigrant hatchetmen who by all accounts were pretty normal people who led pretty normal lives. Just regular looking white kids. One was an aspiring boxer, the other, an apparent pothead who was good at wrestling. Ordinary people, who, for some reason snapped.

Everybody had the perpetrators of this whole terrible incident fingered long before there was any evidence. And everybody was wrong. Worse, people wrongly fingered by the internet “sleuths” remain threatened by violence by would-be vigilantes. It wasn't some international plot, it wasn't some deranged crackpot who was angry about his guns being taken away, it was just a couple of suburbanites who lost their marbles.

The world isn't always what it seems.