60 Minutes’ Television Summaries of the Boston Marathon Bombing  — and the Anticipated Opening of the 911 Museum — Illustrate Our Lack of a National Sense of Moral Proportion — which Sadly Results in Repeatedly Compounding the International Cruelties of the Human Condition

© 2013 Peter Free

 

22 April 2013

 

 

Theme — when we do not recognize that everything is connected, we concentrate on the wrong elements of Life’s net and ignore the rest — which means that terrible things happen, over and over again

 

Three stories on 60 Minutes last night inadvertently demonstrated this phenomenon:

 

 

Scott Pelley, 60 Minutes: The Boston Bombings, 60 Minutes (21 April 2013)

 

Leslie Stahl, The 9/11 Museum: Curating memories of terror and tragedy, 60 Minutes (21 April 2013)

 

Lara Logan, Sniffing Out Bombs: Meet America's most elite dogs, 60 Minutes (21 April 2013)

 

The first story reflects how we typically react to terrorist acts on our soil.

 

The second illustrates how we enshrine these incidents in such a way that we prevent the wounds from scabbing, which leads to persistently irrational and evidence-lacking policy thinking.

 

And the third segment inadvertently illustrates (in a microcosm) the price that we, and the rest of the world, pay for our exaggerated responses to certain kinds of horrors, but not to others.

 

 

 

Americans appear to enjoy reveling in victimization, anti-terrorist outrage, militarized lash-back, and objectively overblown national pride

 

Intemperance is almost never good.  The fact that most of ours is blind makes it especially damaging.

 

 

Problem 1 — reveling in only selected forms of victimization

 

The Boston Marathon bombings became a kind of vicariously thrilling television horror show.  Beginning Monday and ending late Friday, media coverage took on aspects of a peculiar form of reality TV.

 

After the immediate thrill ended Friday, the media continued to rehash what had happened through the weekend.  It will continue to do so, until viewership drops considerably — or some other bloody event occurs.

 

What struck me about the over-and-over-again character of the Boston coverage is that we, as a culture, display a disproportionate sense of outrage that seems to be metered out according to the rarity and “foreignness” of the threat:

 

 

Americans seemingly place an inordinate fear on violence that is random and unexplainable and can be blamed on "others" – jihadists, terrorists, evil-doers etc.

 

But the lurking dangers all around us – the guns, our unhealthy diets, the workplaces that kill 14 Americans every single day – these are just accepted as part of life, the price of freedom, if you will.

 

And so the violence goes, with more Americans dying preventable deaths.

 

But hey, look on the bright side – we got those sons of bitches who blew up the marathon.

 

© 2013 Michael Cohen, Why does America lose its head over 'terror' but ignore its daily gun deaths?, The Guardian (20 April 2013) (paragraph split)

 

Objective criteria for measuring comparative historical, social, and public health importance are completely lost.  See, here, in illustration.

 

For example, the national sadness of the Newtown, Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings — temporarily revived (for many people) by the Senate’s failure to act on gun control — disappeared, just as soon as the Boston bombs detonated.

 

Lost always in the national consciousness is our daily toll of 82 deaths and 207 woundings directly attributable to firearms (2007 calculation).

 

The cost for this kind of myopia is that, in reacting to one kind of upsetting event in marked preference to another and perennially much greater one, we craft stupid policies, like the “War on Terror”.  These irrational reactions are directly related to our inability to prioritize actual threats, ether by (a) their probability of occurring and (b) the damage that they actually cause.

 

 

Problem 2 — an overreactive mentality encourages us to ignore consequential human costs

 

Exercising untempered outrage tips dominoes that we don’t see.  This is the subtle part of the 60 Minutes trilogy that even the show’s producers missed.

 

After the arguably over the top coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings and aftermath, the 60 Minutes segment on the 9/11 Museum showed how we institutionalize that kind of pain, in preference to other others, afterward.

 

Leslie Stahl’s interview of the 9/11 Museum staff revealed that photographs of each of the 2,977 civilian and first responder victims of that awful day will go up on the walls.  Included also will be voice recordings of selected last moment messages from the airplane crews and passengers involved.

 

But there will be no photographs of the 6,648 American troops killed (as of 21 April 2013) in our subsequent overreactions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

Nor will there be (apparently) any reference to the 100,000 plus Iraqis killed, or to the many obliterated Afghanis caught up in the melee.

 

 

A note on relevant spiritual practice

 

Only one of the world’s five major religions treats the problem of emotional disproportion and irrationality adequately.  That is Buddhism — which in some core aspects is not a religion in the Western sense, but rather a psychology of mind.  It emphasizes the interconnectivity of all phenomena and begins with the cultivation of self-awareness, as a prescriptive first step toward spiritually based skillfulness.

 

Simplistically speaking, Buddhism’s primary tenet is that we create the majority of our own problems by failing to see:

 

how things are connected

 

and

 

how our personal blindness contributes to the human suffering that ripples through Life’s net.

 

When we exaggerate one phenomenon in preference to another, we automatically create a tension that moves outward in unpleasant ways.

 

Our exaggerated military and domestic reactions to 9/11 provide examples of failing to see the predictable consequences of irrationally taken action.  The trend continues today, for example, with our willingness:

 

to collaterally kill innocent people with drones

 

and

 

to abandon previously strongly held Fourth Amendment protections.

 

The Web of Connections and Causations is always there, even when we refuse to see and explore it.

 

 

An ironic illustration of failing to see connections

 

During a segment of the 60 Minute trilogy last night, Lara Logan interviewed green beret Army Sergeant Chris Corbin about his military working dog, Ax.  The focus of the episode was on the combat value of military bomb dogs.

 

Instead of making a direct connection to 9/11, 60 Minutes casually mentioned, midway through the dog story, that:

 

Sgt. Corbin had lost both legs stepping on an IED (with Ax) in Afghanistan in 2011,

 

and

 

the inspiringly remarkable man had rehabilitated himself to return to active duty as a green beret.

 

The producers missed a chance to directly point to the sacrifices that our troops make in unquestioningly carrying out frequently idiotic policies formulated by people, who are acting out of emotion and selfish political calculation.  60 Minutes also missed the opportunity to connect the dots that led from 9/11 to the unnecessary volumes of blood lost in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 

Sgt. Corbin unintentionally made the connection himself by explaining what it is like to be a soldier in a perpetually “on edge war” zone like Afghanistan.  “Outside the wire,” each step is a mortal risk.

 

More astute and experienced viewers will have picked up on what he said.  Most won’t.  Unless you’ve been where steps are risks, the empathic connection is not an easy one to make.  And lacking this kind of detailed empathy, we fail to recognize the enormity of what it means to send people to war.

 

Like those who died in retaliatory response in both countries, model-in-courage Sgt. Corbin’s photograph will not be posted in the 9/11 Museum.  Nor will those of the tens of thousands, who were also maimed in carrying out America’s poorly thought out revenge for that day.

 

Note — if you want to read more about Sgt. Chris Corbin, SEE:

 

Justin Heinze, A language of his own — Army Sgt. 1st Class Chris Corbin ignores advice and expectations to battle back from IED injuries, The Red 7 (13 April 2013)

 

 

The moral? — Selectively blind emotionalism, combined with poorly controlled outrage, leads to human losses that we too frequently refuse to calculate

 

The Military Industrial Complex, politicians, and the media benefit.  Humanity does not.