David McElroy

I live in a middle class suburb about 15 miles west of downtown Birmingham. It has nice subdivisions and a collection of middle and upper-middle income families. It’s safe. I frequently walk the streets after midnight and don’t have a concern in the world. It’s a great place to live and a great place to raise children.

This past Sunday, I visited a different world for a few minutes. The contrast was scary. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

We all know there are parts of just about every city where “everybody knows not to go.” But even expressing the idea that way reveals a terrible bias. “We” know not to go there, by which we mean people with the money, education and the ability to live anywhere else.

Just before noon Sunday, I headed to downtown Birmingham because I wanted to catch Amtrak’s Crescent passenger train coming through, because I’d been wanting to shoot video of it. By the time I got to the station, the train was already in, so I needed to find a place just west of the station to catch it as it started leaving town.

I don’t know that part of town well. The part just to the west of the train station is industrial and the streets are cut up. Many of the buildings seemed abandoned, so it felt a bit like an industrial ghost town. I had to turn down confusing and cut up streets to find my way past the area. Using my iPhone’s GPS, I was able to see that if I’d head about six more blocks and then turn and head in another direction for four or five blocks, I should get to a railroad crossing not far from the main line after it left the station.

I was quickly scared. Nobody looked like me. The cars they drove were different from mine. They looked at me as though I were an alien.

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When the two suspected Boston bombers turned out to be Muslims from another country, the drumbeat of the ignorant started again.

“The Muslims are out to get us,” they ranted. “If we close the borders and quit letting foreigners in from those countries, things like this won’t happen.”

Let’s assume that Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are the Boston Marathon bombers. They came to this country about a decade ago after leaving Chechnya, a region controlled by Russia, but filled with an ethnic group that’s mostly Muslim and that has a deep desire to become independent. So for those eager to close the borders, we have the things they seem to hate the most: Muslims from an ethnic group that doesn’t look like white Americans, who were born in another country.

So is this the quick cure for ending mass murder? Keep Muslims out? Keep out ethnicities that don’t look like most of us? Keep foreigners from moving here?

Unfortunately for the people who seem to imply this would fix everything, their narrative falls apart quickly.

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The available evidence leads me to believe that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was one of the people who bombed the Boston Marathon last Monday. I certainly can’t prove it — and I would want to see first-hand evidence if I were on a jury trying him — but I’m comfortable assuming he’s guilty for now.

If he’s guilty as I assume he is, he’s a cold-blooded killer. A monster. A selfish murderer with no regard for other people.

Despite that, I’m very concerned that police don’t intend to read Tsarnaev his Miranda rights. He’s injured and can’t speak right now, but when he’s finally questioned, he’s not going to be told that he has the right to remain silent. He won’t be told that he has the right to an attorney to represent him. It will just be up to this 19-year-old to happen to remember for himself what his rights as an American citizen are. (And you can bet that police and the FBI are going to work hard to convince him he has no rights.)

If you want to know about the history of the so-called “public safety exception” to reading a suspect his rights, take a look at this article in Slate. I’m not going to rehash the legal history of the matter, but you’ll understand the issues better if you read it.

I only want to emphasize one thing about this. If we’re supposed to have rights that are guaranteed to be honored by government — but those rights can be set aside at the sole discretion of that same government — those aren’t really recognized rights. Those are just privileges that we’re allowed to have when it’s convenient for government to allow them.

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