This paradox where it comes to terrorism isn't exactly news. The core strategic objective of many a terror campaign over the years --throughout history-- has been the severity of retribution elicited. Punishment for punishment is meted out and the fringe cause comes somewhere closer step by step to level footing with the power it challenges.
But with the Boston Marathon bombings we have something slightly but very importantly different. From what we've learned thus far it would appear this violence wasn't a part of some coordinated terror campaign. There was no mastermind calling the shots from some darkened cave. The "religious motivations" that drove the bombers were vaguely ideological. These weren't holy soldiers so much as they were sentimentalists, alienated young men hungry for a sense of meaning and consequence to their actions, to their existence. Anything to escape anonymity and a sense of purposelessness --anything to attain celebrity. Islam might might have seemed to offer a cosmic sort of celebrity, but one has to wonder if this was merely a choice of brand, not much different from the notoriety of spectacle slaughter to an Aurora, Colorado multiplex shooting spree --or the carnage of a Connecticut schoolroom.
The dead don't know the difference.
This is where the question of the punishment folds back upon itself for me. I am one of those who generally and statistically argues against the death penalty. As I consider them now I know these murders are not statistical cases. And I realize none of them ever are for those touched directly by crime. Just now I don't think I can frame this as a political argument with obvious sides. I've been more certain about this issue in the past. Words like mercy and compassion and redemption, what do they mean to us weighed against a word like justice? Who holds that scale to weigh them? I suppose we each of us have to. This is where it becomes personal.
I don't regret that we've made it difficult to execute even our most despicable citizens in this country. Yet there is the bind. It is with this that I worry what signal of meaning we give in those rare instances when we choose to do just that. As we render each state killing so carefully, deliberately --ritualistically even--we might unwittingly dignify the reckless crimes of desperately warped children. With our extraordinary punishment we might offer the notice and sense of importance they crave. We might punish with the very reward they seek. Doesn't that invite the next atrocity?
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