“And maintain good conduct among the non-Christians, so that
though they now malign you as wrongdoers, they may see your good deeds and
glorify God when he appears.” (1 Peter
2:12 NET Bible)
On Monday, April 15,
at 2:50 p.m. a bomb exploded near the finish line of the Boston marathon. A
second bomb exploded a few seconds later.
I heard about it shortly thereafter and posted the following facebook status
at 3:38 p.m.: “At the Boston Marathon?
What's wrong with people?” Not one of my
better posts – just a gut reaction on the spur of the moment.
I reacted quickly, but the left reacted even more
quickly. By 3:22 p.m. Charles
Pierce of Esquire.com had already “cautioned” us against “jumping to
conclusions about foreign terrorism” and warned us “to remember that this is
the official Patriots Day holiday in Massachusetts.” The implication was clear enough – this looks
like the work of right-wingers. Pierce
did not have to speculate alone. Later
that evening Michael Moore initiated a series of tweets
implying the same thing that Pierce had.
Moore suggested that he could put “2+2” together, a backhanded insult to
anyone who didn’t reach the same simple conclusion that he had.
And so it went for days. You probably saw the same coverage that I did
– the talking heads perched on the edges of their chairs atingle with the
anticipation that some right-wing nut might have been responsible for
this. Typical was the April 17 CNN
piece asserting that the pressure cooker bomb formula has been used, not
only by Islamic terrorists, but also “has been adopted by extreme right-wing
individuals in the United States.”
Seriously.
Well, now we know that the bombers were Chechen terrorists
after all. So should we expect the
sheepish apologies to start flowing as fast and furious as the slanderous innuendo? Of course not. I guess Michael Moore has “apologized” in his
own way – he tacitly acknowledged that he had slandered the right by tweeting
a lame joke about his error. I guess the
victims of his false speculation aren’t worthy of a real apology. It’s almost as though the left-wing media
apparatus is channeling Roseanne
Roseannadanna with a collective, “Oh, never mind!”
So be it. We all have
a tendency to assume the worst about those who differ from us. We even have words for that tendency—words like
“prejudice” and “bigotry.” I’m certainly
not immune, so I suppose that I shouldn’t throw stones. But I do pray that the next time I publicly
assume the worst about a group and am proven wrong that I will have the decency
simply to apologize, without jokes and without excuses. Now that I’ve written this, I suppose there
might be someone there to help keep me honest.
I hope so.
