Much of what we hear about the Boston Marathon murders is -- excuse me -- unadulterated mush. Have we had enough yet of teddy bears, plastic flowers and yellow ribbons? Have we had enough of the vapid talk that seems inevitably to follow them? Take this, for example, from yesterday's Washington Post article commemorating the bombing:
Boston and its surroundings braced for an emotional week that begins Tuesday...It will be a chance to mourn the dead and remember the bloodshed, but also...to marvel at the way events have brought this community together.
"We're going to turn it into a moment of unity and perseverance and [strength] as a city," said Alison Beliveau, 25, of South Boston, who finished a run Monday morning outside Marathon Sports, where the first bomb went off one year ago. "We made it through. We're going to make it."
Did anyone ever doubt that they were "going to make it?" I know this will be attacked as unfeeling, but it's time to say it out loud: Is there anything here but trendy, empty sentiment? All these commemorative talks, especially by politicians, are just so much hot air. That by itself wouldn't be too awful -- hot air is what politicians do -- but I think there's something more subversive going on: It distracts us from the central reality, and from what we need to do.
The central reality is that we have a stone cold killer on whom we are almost certainly going to lavish many years and many millions worth of legal procedures designed to help him evade what he earned.
As I noted before, no sensate person doubts that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did it (he's on videotape planting the knapsack with the bomb in it); or that he's mentally sound; or that he knew full well what he was doing. He has a right in a civilized country to put on whatever case he fairly has as to mitigation. But in a civilized and sane country, he has no right to spend millions of other people's money to try to concoct supposed mitigation in the form of multi-syllabic "syndromes" that are, I promise you, what the defense and their shrinks are ginning up as I'm typing this. Nor, in such a country, does he have the right to years and years of procedural wrangling in one reviewing court after the next after the next.
It's time to put away mush and get on with justice. Yes, I understand that any normal human being is going to feel intense sadness when he or she thinks of what happened a year ago; I was having a pretty rough time as I put up the picture of Martin Richard in my post earlier today, thinking of the life a little boy will never have.
There is a time to mourn -- a time to mourn, and a time to act. Now, not years from now, is the time to act.
Agreed! I can't feel warm and fuzzy about one year look-backs and self-congratulation about "making it" as long as justice is delayed/denied.
The thought of multiple, amoral, court-appointed defense attorneys stopping at nothing to bring the wheels of justice to a halt is almost as bad as the seeming complicity of the Courts and the public's acceptance of this sad state of affairs.