By Russell C. Smith and Michael Foster
The Boston Marathon terrorist attack was horrible. Three innocent lives were taken and many people were injured and disfigured for life.
One thing the photographs taken the day of the Marathon show is that a great many countries from all over the world were represented. The flags near the finish line and the runners come from all over our planet.
The young, disturbed men who committed the act didn’t get the fact that they weren’t just performing a terrorist act against America, they were harming people from everywhere.
Has terrorism finally reached a tipping point? When a terrorist act goes against all of us, every country on Earth has a stake in stopping this type of insane violence against humanity.
Everywhere on the planet is where all of us live. Innocent people out on a sunny day, spending time with families and friends, don’t deserve to be sentenced to death or grave bodily injury. There is no reason this should have happened. Yet it did. And in the aftermath, a truth about the insanity of violence comes to light. Senseless violence doesn’t make sense. It just shatters lives and its waves ripple out into society.
If fundamentalist beliefs helped push these young men over the edge and made horrific violent acts seem the only viable option, fundamentalism was lying to them. The final result of fundamentalism always seems to be people killing other people who don’t believe what they believe. This is absolute insanity. Any fundamentalist belief system that encourages its followers to commit violence is a faulty belief system.
In the same way we’re all connected through the need for fresh air and clean water, we are all closely connected by the desire to live safely in our own countries, everywhere on the planet. Like it or not, millions of us are connected through social media. This may be the first time social media has played such a large part in helping to track down suspects. As a tool for both positive actions and a dangerous invasion of privacy, social media is here to stay, at least for a good long while.
Last week’s horrific event has also shown one of the important uses for the surveillance technology all around us. On a certain level, our surveillance society has proven itself good and useful. It helped catch the bad guys in record time.
We may be living in a far more peaceful time than any other in human history, and it might be no accident that we are also more connected than ever before. On top of being wired to be social creatures, we are now literally wired into events as they unfold in our own countries, and elsewhere on the planet. By sharing tragic events, we are having shared experiences and feeling each others pain.
People want to live in a better, more peaceful world—a world where interconnectedness and creativity count for something—and where having an open mind and an ability to accept opposing views, lifestyles, ideas, and yes, beliefs makes us all stronger, and doesn’t keep tearing us apart.
