Calm and perspective needed for Boston, not accusations and games

By David McElroy · April 16, 2013

An explosion went off in Boston Monday. Three people were killed. Close to 200 more were hurt or maimed. That’s about the extent of what we can factually say about what happened toward the end of the Boston Marathon.

As soon as the news of the explosion came out Monday, people across the country started wildly speculating and making ugly accusations. On Facebook, I unfriended and blocked several people because of such nastiness. One faction claimed the entire thing was a “false flag” operation by the U.S. government. (Multiple Facebook groups were set up to make the claim, including this one.) Many people pointed to Middle Eastern terrorists. Still others, including an analyst on CNN, warned of “right wing extremists.”

It seemed that everyone had a political point to make — an accusation to hurl based on the political positions they already held. They were all looking at a virtual ink blot, but each one saw something based on the lens through which he was looking, not based on what was really there.

Back in 1996, there was a bombing in Atlanta during the summer Olympics. A security guard named Richard Jewell was treated as a suspect. He was first called a hero, but police came to suspect him. Media hounded him like hungry wolves. Jewell’s life was destroyed. Eventually, he was cleared. He had had nothing to do with the attacks, but police and media couldn’t take back the ugly and baseless accusations. They couldn’t give Jewell his life back.

Similar stories might yet play out in Boston. There’s a 20-year-old Saudi man who media reports claim has been questioned. Tuesday morning, there were reports of a “mysterious” man on the roof of a building. Everyone seems to be looking for something to latch onto and assign blame to. A former Obama advisor said he thinks the president believes the attack is somehow related to it being “tax day.”

Everyone wants to find someone to blame.

Television and the Internet are filled with speculation, not with facts. People’s emotions are being worked up into a frenzy based on what might be the case. And everybody participating in this media orgy is doing nothing but irresponsibly fanning flames of anger and fear — whether they’re the allegedly respected professional news people or the nutcase fringe liars such as Alex Jones.

I don’t know the important facts about what happened or why. You don’t, either. Your political or religious prejudices about other people won’t be of any help in understanding this. Please stop speculating. Please stop making accusations. You’re not only making yourself look foolish, but you’re also contributing toward the kind of public panic that leads politicians to seize more power to “make us safer.” Please stop.

We need perspective and calm about this right now. Get away from television news. Quit obsessively reading stories about it that offer nothing but more fear and fuel your anger. Quit looking at the gory pictures.

This kind of violence is fairly common around the world. We’re fortunate enough that it’s unusual here. Be thankful for that, but realize that a society where it happens can still go on functioning as it figures out what happened and responds to it reasonably. Realize that a society that stops in its tracks and fundamentally changes itself because of random violence is one that’s playing right into the hands of whoever did this.

A lot of people at this scene were directly affected by the blast Monday. Their lives will never be the same. The best thing the rest of us can do — for them and for the rest of society — is to get on with our lives and live without the fear and anger that attacks such as this are designed to produce.

If you want to take some action because of this, channel it to something useful. Show other people that you love them and value them. Be kinder and more loving to strangers and people you already know.

You can let yourself be filled with anger and hatred about this incident, but it won’t do you or anyone else any good. Or you can choose to focus elsewhere — and overcome evil with good.

It’s your choice.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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