What’s Going On

By all accounts, President Obama’s address to the city of Boston at an interfaith service yesterday morning was poignant, expressing what amounted to a beautiful panegyric echoing the fact that, for various reasons, many Americans have a personal connection to the Cradle of Liberty. The speech was notable and appurtenant due to its invocation of Scripture and its appeal for prayers for those who lost loved ones in Monday’s horrific affair. The president was rightly praised for his call for resilience—few have any doubt Boston can and will “run again.”

While a prayer service is obviously not the place for politics or inadvertent fear mongering, something crucial has been missing from the government’s response thus far to the marathon bombing. Leadership. Answers. Truth in a time of unmitigated angst. While the president successfully brought the nation together to mourn, he has yet to provide any clues to the information we all desperately crave—what the hell is going on?

Four days after the attack, there is a woeful paucity of divulgences regarding what actually happened at the finish line. Part of this is only natural; the FBI does have culprits to catch after all, and the government obviously does not want to interfere with the manhunt. But Monday’s catastrophe was still a terrorist attack. One that extended its malicious tentacles across the Charles and into Harvard Square. The Cambridge Bomb Squad was ostentatiously parked outside the Harvard Square T stop on Wednesday, two days after the beastly irruption into our daily routines. For all intents and purposes, our home as been transformed into something like a warzone, a terrifying reality that has yet to be resolved or even properly acknowledged by those entrusted with the ward of our safety.  The need for leadership is all the more pressing in light of last night’s fatal shooting at MIT.

Obama’s address had passing mention of the yet unidentified antagonists. He even went so far as to mention “intimidating” and “terrorizing” as the assailants’ primary motives. But this is simply not enough.

It is understandable that the government wishes to be circumspect in its characterization of the event. After the racial profiling blunder that led to the embarrassing raid of an innocent Saudi marathoner, the government has obvious reasons to avoid making unsubstantiated claims. But as American citizens residing in what very well might have become part of the theater of operations, we have a right to know the nature of the peril in which we find ourselves. It is a testament to the government’s failure to be forthcoming that speculation, reporting, and even vigilantism have emerged on social media networks like Twitter and Reddit, the latter of which has engaged in the dangerous business of labeling random Bostonians as “suspicious.”

The reaction of these netizens is only to be expected given the legitimate frustration harbored by those of us in the Boston area. We want something. We need something. At 5 p.m. on Wednesday, excited reporters gathered outside of the federal courthouse after rumors circulated that the bomber had been captured and after being promised an official briefing on the matter. This briefing was canceled, and the courthouse was evacuated due to another bomb scare, only to be rescheduled for 8 p.m. That planned episode of disclosure was also subsequently canceled.

In an interview with Wolf Blitzer, Governor Deval L. Patrick ’78 complained, “there’s been a lot of chaos and a lot of misinformation floating around.” Of course there is. In fact, with no official information provided, each addition to the saga can be reasonably classified as misinformation. Yesterday afternoon, the public finally received something meaningful from the FBI—images of the two primary suspects. Yet, with this release came a government plea to its citizens for help. While obviously all available resources should be pooled together to nab the perpetrators, it is a bit discomfiting that the best our leaders can do is give us more questions to add to the tremulous surfeit of those already boiling inside us. No comfort. No explanation. No statement.

Hopefully, this situation is resolved in short time, so that Boston’s residents can develop a necessary understanding of what truly transpired. We all deserve a prudently cogitated reflection, and that is unfortunately not possible without full intelligence of the matter. For now, all we have is this spirit of civic solidarity that carefully and usefully masks the ubiquitous spirit of fear. While the president’s words yesterday were not sufficient for the occasion, they were indeed necessary. Collective grief is a surefire way to avoid ending up stalled in collective terror. But we can only contain our emotions for so long, and the state of social media is a prime indicator that such a time period is not very extensive at all. The government owes us answers, and we will continue to feverishly refresh our Facebook news feeds until that moment of revelation finally arrives. In the meantime, we’ll be forced to wait patiently with the debilitating twin feelings of uncertainty and despair.

John F. M. Kocsis ’15, a Crimson editorial writer, is a government concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.