We were all outraged by the bombings in Boston and had every right to be. We all, including myself, shouted out our anger and our contempt for the cowards who would commit such an egregious attack on innocent people engaged in a friendly and intercultural event.
And the media responded, indeed encouraged our fear and anger by saturating this horrific crime on both Canada’s TV stations for days and days, virtually 24/7, making it clear to all that we all stood together to denounce this cowardly attack.
But it did not swat to help the citizens of Boston. But the cool, unexcited police and intelligence agents simply went back to check the root cause and, in the end caught the culprits, ending the city’s siege. Just think of this—out of the millions and millions of citizens in the area they managed to track down and successfully corner the two suspects!
But our yelling and screaming, albeit emotionally satisfying, got us nowhere.
Zilch.
( Mind you nations such as Iran probably got a lot of satisfaction watching what must seemed hilarious to them as we ran around like turkeys who had seen a mongoose outside their pen and, of course, the culprits-and their friends saw how massive was the publicity they could accrue by these kind of attacks.)
But Trudeau was wrong and Harper was right—in politics you go for the voter’s emotions, not for the facts. Harper knows that every time one of these attacks take place gives him a chance to thunder that he will being these criminals to justice, making him appear strong, resolute. He knows full well that nothing he does will help to catch these losers but sooner or later the police will get the job done. Thus you can have these bombings time after time after time and he probably feels this is still the best way of handling them.
Now Trudeau’s mistake is in thinking that many–outside of academia at least- people want to search for reasons—as long as we keep catching these criminals all is going to be well. In fact, many feel that finding a reason may make us a soft on the culprits, there are many, perhaps even Harper , who actually think that harsh punishment Is going to dissuade these kind of fanatics. Wow.
Trudeau is going to have to catch up quick to the harsh truth that voters are not going to waste a lot of time analyzing the issues, period. He is standing in the medias cross hairs right now and his advisors better wake up.
Cheers, Andy Mulcahy