Information in a Time of Tragedy

In the wake of the recent, horrific bombing in Boston, I’ve found myself reading a slew of articles related to the two suspects. As the public reels from the shock, journalists continue to churn piece after piece summarizing what we know and promising more information soon. The same facts are rehashed over and over; for some reason, I still want to read every article I can get my hands on.

We feel the need to make tragedies make sense. Something about providing a narrative through research and analysis gives us a sense of power over something that recently made us feel so powerless. We want to know why. We hope we will find our “why” in the next detail of the suspects’ personal lives, friends, or family. Eventually, we will manage to put together a cohesive story we can tell to ourselves and others that integrates the deaths of strangers into our cohesive picture of the world.

There are two dangers during this process. First, there is a perverse tendency to investigate the wrong things in our attempt to gather information. In the last twenty-four hours a number of articles have appeared describing Katherine Tsarnaeva, the wife of the elder suspect in the bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. In order to prevent a silence as we await more news, the media has begun to delve deeply into her personal life and relationship to her husband. Insinuations that she will explain her husband to the world circulate. Suddenly, she is accountable as the next-of-kin for an act of terror she almost certainly was not privy to.

It is also important for us to let the tragedy remain impenetrably, unspeakably sorrowful. We want to store it away in a box, blaming it on “an act of terror by Islamic fundamentalists” or “another example of the disaffection of young men in America.” It may fall into these categories in some way, but it is far too nuanced to neatly store in our mental filing system. The perpetrators, like the victims, like the rest of us, were irreducibly complex individuals whose thoughts and goals are unique. Our attempts to determine their identities in the aftermath shows a dangerous desire to make history first sensible, then true.

Of course, there are many good reasons for investigation of the suspects in the bombing, such as future prevention and proper prosecution. However, our attention as a nation would be better spent on respectful remembrance than personality profiles. Understanding every fact about these two suspects will not make an irrational act of terror intelligible, but it can terrorize a recent widow and encourage us to reduce a national tragedy brash, trite explanations.