From Salon: http://www.salon.com/2013/04/15/boston_explosions_highlight_a_frightening_new_reality/
We don’t yet know the cause of what happened in Boston, but the fact that it isn’t surprising is itself terrifying
Monday, Apr 15, 2013
We don’t know what the cause of the Boston Marathon explosion yet. It could be terrorism. It could be some infrastructure-related explosion. But the fact that such a catastrophe is no longer completely surprising is terrifying.
I heard the news as most did – through the digital grapevine. My initial reaction was the same as many people with loved ones in Boston – entirely personal and worried about possible friends and family who might have been maimed or, godforbid, killed. But while I fretted and texted and called, I also realized that something had changed in me – and in all of us – since I fled the U.S. Capitol back on September 11, 2001. What had changed was that while I was nervous, worried, disgusted and anxious — and while I was shaking my head muttering rhetorical questions about the senselessness of the world — I was no longer shocked.
If it is terrorism, this will be classified – as the TV anchors are now reminding us in Clockwork Orange-like repetition – as simply life in the “post-9/11” era. If it is some sort of infrastructure-related tragedy, it will be classified as just daily life in a nation whose neglect of its physical plant brings us sinkholes, power outages and pipe explosions.
Whatever the cause of this catastrophe, though, the reaction is proof that we have reached a new normal – one that increasingly defines major news events in America as those exclusively involving death and carnage.
Yes, it’s true – since humans put pen to paper to report current events, news has always been defined by the “if it bleeds, it leads” ethos. But in recent years, with both the heightened prospect of terrorism, the proliferation of mass shootings and the mundane persistence of now-mundane gun violence, the aphorism seems like it has been flipped around: if it leads, or if it is even considered news, it inevitably must bleed.
Continue reading at: http://www.salon.com/2013/04/15/boston_explosions_highlight_a_frightening_new_reality/
