(or: The perils of seeing both sides.)
Note: This post is an amended version of an e-mail I sent to comedian Hannah Gadsby, in reply to a Tweet she posted on Saturday morning Melbourne time: 'if I were suspected of something really bad then I hope I had done it because it doesn't seem to matter either way.' Odds are she stopped reading roughly two sentences in because... well, she has no idea who the eff I am, for starters; but should I hear back I'll post her reply.
As I'm sure you all know, I still follow the
Australian news very closely. Of all the sickening news of 2012, the Roberto Curtis story stands out in my mind as especially disgusting. It
was the definition of 'miscarriage of justice' and of 'police brutality',
all wrapped up in one heartbreaking package. And back when I moved back to the States, I was plunged into the Casey Anthony trial, and after the verdict I
remember saying almost the exact thing Hannah Gadsby tweeted: I hoped Casey had actually done everything she was
accused of and had somehow mistakenly got away with it, because she was
going to be punished for it for the rest of her life either way.
But I think this case is different.
All
apart from the photo and video evidence that linked the two suspects to
the marathon bombing, there was the rampage they went on Thursday
night. They shot a police officer who appears to have posed no threat to
them; they carjacked a Mercedes SUV (so clearly had some new money
tacky in them as well, but even I'll admit that's not a criminal
offense) and announced to the driver that they were the marathon
bombers; they engaged in a gunfight with officers wherein they (the
brothers) were throwing explosive devices at the cops. When the elder
brother's body was recovered (after the younger one drove over it in a
desperate attempt to flee), it was found that he had been wearing a
suicide vest.
These were not innocents, or potential innocents,
trying to escape their own miscarriage of justice. I agree that a
fearful innocent would run from police if she/he felt in danger - I know
my ass would be breaking land-speed records - but this was not that.
I grew up in Boston, I lived here until I was 22 and
moved to Sydney. When I had to leave Australia, it was to Boston I
came. I have worked, hard, to try to make a new life here, to put aside
the heartbreak of having to leave the people I loved and the city I loved
and the country I loved and the only adult life I'd ever known, and
create some happiness. I worked to forge new connections with the city I
loved (where, less than a week ago, two bombs were exploded in a spot I
walk through several times a week, where people I know and love
watched limbs fly past their faces and only by the tiniest of margins
escaped without losing their own). I found a job (at Boston Medical
Center, where 23 critically injured victims were brought). I met a girl
(who works an hour north of Boston and whose greatest fears all came
true at once, when I was stuck inside the city and she was stuck outside
while bombs went off and made echoes of being evacuated from an office
building in Manhattan 12 years ago dance in her head). And she and I
live in the beautiful, fun, and safe neighourhood of Inman Square,
Cambridge (in a house that is exactly, *exactly* two blocks from the
now-notorious address of 410 Norfolk Street). We spent all of Friday in lockdown. The entire city, inner and outer suburbs, shut
down for an entire day because of two people. Can you even imagine that?
I'm not being facetious, I'm seriously asking. Because I was here and I
lived through it and I can't imagine it.
And now I live in fear that the
US will fuck it up worse. I had been hoping so hard that they would turn
out to be local white Christians with a crazy tea-party bone to pick.
Ideally they would be ranting stereotypes, with weird teeth and a
misunderstanding of the word 'socialism', and I would laugh at them and
hate them and go to bed knowing that no one here would try to use them as
an excuse to go to war somewhere. I had feared so hard that they would
turn out to be furreners, especially dark-skinned Muslim
furreners who would be so very furren that they could be nothing
but the Other, and another round of madness would ensue. But what I got
was dead in the middle, further complicated by the endless stream of
reports about the younger brother, Dzhokhar, who as by all accounts the
sweetest, kindest, gentlest boy anyone had ever met. He used to
skateboard around my neighborhood, for fuck's sake. And now this? What
happened? How could we as a community have failed him so suddenly and so
utterly that he did this?
I want a reason. I want clarity, I want to believe
that the mosque and halal butchery down my street and all who use
them will be safe and left in peace, I want the eyes of the world to
watch how we treat this boy and feel that we treated him fairly and that
justice was done for everyone, not just for the victims. That is what
I'm hoping for now because that's all that's left to hope for. And I
think that's why I had to reply to her tweet, at what have seemed to her to be an
utterly interminable length: I
want the rest of the world to understand, to see that the officers did
work to take him alive, to see that he will get a fair trial, to see
that there won't be any misplaced retribution against people who happen
to have an accent or a region or a nose or a god in common with these
two brothers. I want the world to see that, and even more, I want it to
be what really happens. And if it doesn't, I want the world to believe
that I and others like me will yell and scream and do whatever we can to
hold accountable anyone who was involved. I have to live in this
country, at least for now; I am going to do my damnedest to make it
somewhere worth living.
And a P.S. to John Ashcroft, John McCain, and the other dumbfucks who are pushing for a military trial: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is an American citizen, acting with only his brother, with no ties to any cell or group here or anywhere else in the world. Get your heads out of your asses, Miranda that shit, and try him in a US court under US law. Justice doesn't only need to be done, it needs to be seen to be done. Quit being fucktards for once, for god's sake.
