America’s greatest quality is the ability to rally after tragedy. Boston and West, Texas, received encouragement and aid from their respective communities and the nation at large.
When we take fear out of the equation, we take away the enemies’ power. It’s the closest we can come to a win in such a situation.
But we need to go further.
For five days, the media flooded the channels with coverage of the Boston manhunt. While Monday’s bombing and the subsequent events were certainly newsworthy and merited hours of coverage, it completely drowned out coverage of other events last week.
During the hunt for the Tsarnev brothers, the House of Representatives voted on legislation that could open your private information to government inspection.
On Thursday, the Republican-controlled House voted to pass the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act by a vote of 288-127. It now heads to the Senate, where a similar version of the bill died last year.
While the title may leave you feeling warm and safe, the language in the bill is written so vaguely that even the politicians don’t know what it means.
People bring up rights when Congress weighs gun legislation. They should be going nuts about giving government access to personal emails and cyber activity.
A document, whether digital or physical, should be able to remain entirely private no matter where it’s stored.
The bill will now head to the Democrat-led Senate and could die there like a similar bill last year, but there’s a greater takeaway.
We can’t let every tragedy monopolize our attention. After reporting all available attacks and interviewing witnesses and experts, the media should have continued giving us our daily news.
They didn’t because they knew we’d all stay tuned. They manipulated our fear, and we let them.
Everyone’s guilty, but we’ll get better as we usually do. We just need to remember to stick together.