Aftermath

A sign above the window on the red line train through Cambridge says: “How did the marathon bombings affect you?” Go to Google Play and search “Boston Bombings.”

I go to Google Play and search “Boston Bombings.” Its link encourages me to download a survey app. “Tell what happened to you after the Boston Marathon bombings and earn money for charity!” The exclamation point confuses me. I don’t have a smartphone. I’m not sure I’d participate if I did.

For everyone who completes the survey, those conducting the study will donate $3 to The One Fund Boston. I heard about a man who lost his legs in the bombings becoming a multimillionaire thanks to the reparations he received from the fund. I do not begrudge him this the way I begrudge our society for its equation of money and happiness.

According to The Smithsonian, English speakers are particularly unskilled at identifying and describing smells. We describe them by saying what they smell like: a flower, chocolate, freshly cut grass. The same, I’ve found, is true for experiences. What was it like?

On the first day of my ecological economics class, my professor tells us that the common unit of measurement in a cost-benefit analysis is dollars. He asks us to think of an experience we’ve had involving water. How much would we be willing to pay to experience it again? When the bombings happened, no one knew how to help besides reaching into their wallets so that some foundation could assign a monetary value to other people’s suffering.

How much would you be willing to pay to never have experienced that day?

What did it smell like?

Smoke, mostly. And fear.

*

A poll in the Boston Review reported that respondents who read a story about an American soldier killed in Afghanistan were more likely to turn against the war if the soldier was from the respondent’s home state. I read this in the car as my family drove down the east coast on a summer road trip before my senior year of college. After eight hours of driving, we stood between Virginia and Maryland under an unforgiving sun, reading the names of 58,000 people who lost their lives in Vietnam.

In a sea of other tourists we participated in a common, unspoken ritual, staring somberly at grooves in stone. My mother stood crying softly beside me. I met her eyes, and she wiped her tears. “It’s very upsetting, isn’t it?” she said. To me the Vietnam War is tragic but distant, like someone else’s nightmare. I ran my fingers over the engravings, my hands brushing the names of boys my mother may have known, the same way their own mothers may have once brushed their cheeks before tucking them in.

My dad used my mom’s iPhone to search for the names of two boys he once knew. No results found. His rough fingers searched the nearby directory, shuffling through faded, scattered pages with no semblance of order. He stopped when he found one, his finger posed above smudged ink. I asked if he wanted to locate the name on the wall. He said no.

*

My dad was in the army for four years, stationed in Korea from 1972 to 1975. When I asked him about it, he told me that in high school he once skipped class to attend a peace rally on the Boston Common. Two years later, he stood in line at a recruitment table, choosing to enlist. He was nineteen.

I was nineteen the night Osama Bin Laden was killed. I left my dorm room to join a crowd on the Boston Common. They cheered and yelled, waving banners and signs. Hanging off the gazebo’s column and dancing on the grass, they sang loudly, drunkenly, righteously. “USA! USA!” I remember the surge of patriotism that engulfed me that night, chaotic and wild and distinctly American. Two of my roommates stood on the edge of the grass, bleary-eyed and afraid. “I hate this,” Elana said, shaking her head and looking around. “I really hate it.” I didn’t then, but I do now. Or perhaps I don’t hate it, but fear it. In the days that followed the rally, I began to see the sickness in it all, the trouble with blind patriotism, and the hatred perpetuated by celebrating a death. These words of Martin Luther King, Jr. have never left my mind: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

*

In my performance art class, we learned about the Gothic. In a documentary we watched, a man talked about humanity’s fascination with the repulsive. What he liked most about Gothicism was its expression of the ecstasy of destruction. It doesn’t attempt to deny our darkness, he said. Instead, it finds pleasure in it. It’s there in all of us. Worship the beast, he said. Embrace your dark insanity.

A school therapist once told me to make a list of qualities I dislike most in other people. My heart raced as I ranted against all the traits I disapprove of in my family, my friends. When she’d read what I had written, she explained the concept of the Jungian shadow. The list I had written on my index card, she said, was actually a list of things that I didn’t like about myself.

Most of us prefer to deny our “darkness.” Socially imposed habits of suppression, however, cause it to manifest itself in distorted ways.

*

One of my classmates created an installation about her experience of the marathon bombing. She hung a “Boston Strong” shirt on the wall between two projectors while a slow song played in the background. She explained that her friend had written and recorded it as a tribute to the marathon runners. One projector played a mash-up of news clips and footage from the bombings. The other offered a montage of everyday objects: a spilled glass of wine, a bottle of One-a-Day vitamins, a black backpack. She explained afterwards that she worked in a restaurant on the block where the first bomb detonated. Sometimes she still smells gunpowder. She’s been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The objects in the slideshow trigger it.

“I think PTSD is something people don’t talk about enough,” she says.

I can’t connect with her. Her story of overt sentimentality does not affect me. I am tired of this narrative. My thoughts make me feel guilty.

*

The number of soldiers killed in the Iraq war was recently eclipsed by the number of soldiers who came home and committed suicide. In the days after the marathon bombing, my private college brought in puppies to play with the students and make us feel better. A photo began to circulate the Internet of a group of children holding a hand-painted sign: “Boston Bombings represent a sorrowful scene of what happens every day in Syria. Do accept our condolences.” Comparison of suffering is not fair, but the perspective offered is necessary.

“Obviously, a lot of good things came out of it, too,” the girl in my class said at the end of her presentation. “Boston Strong is an amazing slogan.”

*

Who were you with on the day of the marathon? The online survey asks.

I stood on the sidelines, 3.2 miles from the finish line. Elana’s brother received a phone call from a friend telling us to stay where we were. News came to us in pieces. We stood with a crowd outside of a pizza shop staring at the TV inside while a man seated at the counter ate his slice of cheese. I tried to call my parents, but all service was blocked. A bombing, the news had said. A bombing in Boston.

Two days later, Elana and I walked downtown to a vigil on the Boston Common. Sadness shrouded the city in a thick fog. We passed tanks and SWAT team members standing on street corners. We paused at Copley Square, where men in white biohazard jumpsuits scoured the blockaded street while a crowd of stoic people stood and stared.

Once again surrounded by people at the gazebo, this time we were not celebrating a death, but mourning three. We grieved for our collective loss, the loss that sometimes creeps up on me when I’m riding the train home, feeling tired, lonely, and thoroughly afraid. That night on the Common we confronted our new reality as the sun set modestly. I stood and cried, holding a candle someone had handed to me. A banner hanging on the gazebo read, “Peace Here and Everywhere.” This time there was no cheering, no dancing, no waving of flags or beating of chests. We all sang together, the same songs over and over, not songs of conquer, but of kinship: Imagine, We Shall Overcome.

The following days brought more anguish and fear, and we held our breath through a citywide lockdown while the suspects were hunted. As Elana and I lay on our roof looking out over silent streets, I imagined the nineteen-year-old suspect hiding in someone’s backyard, alone and fearful, wondering what series of events had led him to this moment. Nineteen — just a boy I went to school with or met once at a party. My dad signing up for the army, myself reading news headlines and wondering about patriotism.

*

My art professor showed us a video of a strange, childlike creature dancing onstage, bathed in orange light. Its naked body convulsed, its body moving with dreamlike fluidity. The soundscape in the background spliced together baselines and screeches, sounds that might have been familiar, but weren’t. My class watched in disturbed silence, unsure what we were observing. A classmate suggested that when we are confronted by something in which we can’t recognize ourselves, it scares us. But what scares us more, I think, is when we recognize ourselves in something we hate.

When Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured, the city rejoiced. Friends on Facebook called for his death, his torture. “Hang him high,” one suggested with glee. I went to bed understanding more clearly than ever how hate perpetuates hate, recognizing that the desire for Tsarnaev’s death is no different from the desire that motivated his actions. Most of us would like to think we have consistent morals, but our instinctual responses to a violation of a moral code often prove we’re not as morally well-organized as we wish.

I understand the pleasure of hatred, the comfort of presumed superiority. A week after the marathon, I attended a lecture by activist Tim Wise. He spoke of an Angel-Monster complex at work in our society. If we can classify people like Dzhohkhar Tsarnaev, Dylan Klebold, James Holmes, and Adam Lanza into the ‘monster’ category, he said, then that makes them separate from us. Different from us. But sometimes, most of the time, almost all of the time, people are both. Our society has yet to confront this idea.

*

On another night in another crowd, Boston sports fans celebrated the victory of the Red Sox in the World Series. The chanting of “Yankees Suck” transitioned seamlessly into “Boston Strong.” I’m not sure how a collective exuberance about a baseball team became associated with an expression of quasi-patriotism. That night the crowd worked itself into a kinetic frenzy as police officers watched warily on the other side of a line of steel barricades. Heroes after the capture of Tsarnaev, the police force was once again a potential antagonist. By now, the empty chanting had lost any meaning it might have wished to convey.

*

I’ve come to resent “Boston Strong.” I resent our culture’s reduction of unspeakable tragedies to optimistic bumper stickers. Repeated platitudes are comforting; they also provide further opportunity for economic absolution. We can buy and wear T-shirts that show our support for our city, assuaging us of all other responsibility. Slogans become a means to avoid critical thinking.

It’s important to move forward after tragedy strikes, but more important to consider the causes of the tragedy before doing so. Pinning sudden, destructive events on ‘crazy’ or ‘sick’ individuals is to look at the symptoms and not the disease. When I see someone wearing a “Boston Strong” shirt, I wonder if he or she thinks of smoke and blood and death when they put it on. Or if it’s become the equivalent of a Patriots jersey, a mere show of thoughtless approval. I suspect it’s probably the latter.