The Ineffectiveness of Terrorism

I spent from the 15th to the 22nd of April in Boston.  The timing of my trip has been a topic of conversation with many in- and out-side of Boston.  Most people assume that the terror attack, and subsequent events negatively affected my time in the city.  It is true that a few blocks of one street were closed, as was one subway stop, and the entire city for one day.  Yet, I got to see Boston show itself, and that is a rare time to visit.

Before my writing becomes a Whedonesque take on Sun Tzu, I spent a week visiting a friend, in a historic city, at a time when the whole city was reacting to, talking about, and recovering their lives after a national event.  An event that seems to have captured the attention of the world, and mostly overshadowed an industrial explosion that any other week, would have been all that was on the American news.  Unlike the average week in Beantown, I feel like I saw the citizens of a metropolis share something, and that is a rare occurrence.

Without the marathon bombing, I would have walked away from Boston a little disappointed that Newbury Street is dominated by corporate stores, and that Dunkin' Donuts seem to outnumber Starbucks 3:1, which in turn seems to outnumber local coffeeshops 2:1, making Boston seem to have about as much character as a shopping mall where everyone wears a shirt that says the name of the mall.  (I profoundly apologize to any proud Bostonians that I am offending, but the Old Corner Bookstore is a Chipotle!)

Being in Boston during the bombing does not change the businesses that occupy the historic buildings, but it did allow the people of Boston to shine through where they may not have otherwise.  Walking around Boston with Denise, amidst a sea of "Boston Strong" signs and impromptu memorials, she asked, "does terrorism work"?  (Which she may not have actually asked, but I am definitely giving her the credit for the initial idea.)

In thinking further about this idea, I have thought about all the times that I have said, "If you do that, then the terrorists win."  I have also read myriad comments from internet users asserting that when the police put the city on "lockdown," the terrorist won.  In the case of this incident, we have charged the surviving person accused of being the terrorist, and though we do not know why (or truly if), this 19 year old kid did this, it is hard to look at his situation and argue that he won anything.  Harder still to say that his older brother, who died in his pursuit of whatever he thought he was pursuing, won anything either.  In fact, it seems that those attacked can lose, but that the attackers can never win.

In the case of the attacks in Boston, Bostonians seem to have redoubled their pride in the city, and may have even gone on some defiant runs.  I have no doubt that while there may be additional security, the 2014 Boston Marathon will not be just a city crazed about running, but a country crazed about the patriotism of a running city.  In essence, what the perpetrators did solidified Boston's and America's resolve in what ever it is that the Boston Marathon represents in this culture.

If, instead of isolated attacks, there were repeated attacks, would Bostonian's be shaken in their love of their marathon?  How many years of bombings at the finish line would it actually take before people feared Boylston Street?  Repeated attacks definitely increase the level of terror a populace experiences.  In talking to people who lived in DC during the Beltway sniper attacks, it seemed that they were actually successful at creating terror.  According to first-person accounts I have heard, people would run from their car to the grocery store out of fear.  Statistically, the incidence of a person in the affected area being killed by the sniper was about 0.018/100,000 people.  Had the people of DC run from bacon to prevent heart disease, with a national mortality rate of 268.8/100,000 people, they would have been much better off!  (An American is more than 15,000 times more likely to die of heart disease than a person in DC being killed by the sniper.  DC has a higher incidence of heart disease than the national average, making a resident of the DC area something like 50% more likely to die of heart disease than the average American (gross estimation of CDC data), or, very roughly, 23,000 times more likely than sniper fire.)

For three weeks, one city experienced terrorism caused terror, but the sniper did not win!  Using any act of terror committed in the US as an example, I would say that, in the end, life has continued, more or less, as normal.  Reacting to 11 September 2001 the US created the Patriot Act, two wars, countless dead and wounded, etcetera.  Americans certainly did not come out unscathed, and the world would be a better place had the attacks not occurred, but we are far from checkmate.  Even in places with more terror attacks, the Tamils have, or are much closer to, losing their war in Sri Lanka, despite years of terrorism directed at the Sinhalese.  Both Israelis and Palestinians have directed terrorism at each other, but after decades of violence, is one side any closer to a meaningful "victory"?

People's beliefs are difficult to change, but hearts and minds are not won by violence, but peace and prosperity.  Every country will struggle with how to preserve quality of life, provide safety, and allow its people civil liberties in the face of hatred and violence.  In retrospect we can debate whether shelter-in-place orders, police actions, and new laws benefit life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but I think we need not look any further than Boston to know that the terrorists will never win.

The Microwave

I think it must have been about 1992, 25 years after the first microwave was released, my parents loaded the family into the car to change how life at home would run for the rest of our lives.

We headed into the darkness, and eventually turned onto the long driveway of some family friends. I have no idea what price was paid, but my dad loaded a hulking microwave oven into the back of the car. Included with the oven was a bag of microwave popcorn, and we drove back to our house, excitement about the new appliance thick in the car.

My dad carried in the giant brown box with a large window and formidable dial into the kitchen. The height of the unit slid just barely beneath the cabinetry, and was nestled into a corner, decreasing the available counter space in the small kitchen significantly. The family dog, still in her formative years, could sense the excitement, and gathered with the family in the kitchen, braving the treacherous footing of the linoleum. My mom opened the plastic of the individually wrapped flat, folded bag of popping corn, the smell of butter filling the kitchen, like a manifestation of the anticipation itself.

Instructions were diligently read from the bag, and the microwave settings were validated, the timer set, door opened, and the bag placed in the center of a serving platter-sized carousel, ensuring the correct side was down. Then the moment arrived, the chrome “push to cook” button was pushed for the first time in an Aillaud household. The oven hummed to life, and the bag began its slow rotation in the illuminated chamber.

Nothing happened.

Like kids waiting for Santa, the seconds dragged on. With tail poised to wag, the dog watched us watch the microwave.

Pop!

The shock of the noise echoed through the house. My mom exclaimed about the magic of popping corn in such a futuristic way. The time between pops decreased, until a cacophony of exploding kernels overwhelmed the house, now brimming with the chemical smell of movie theater popcorn. In a mirrored crescendo, the popping from the now bursting bag slowed. Not having realized the insignificance of pushing the start button, the true moment in which our lives forever changed rang through the house.

Ding!

With as much suspicion as excitement, the steaming bag was removed from the microwave, an intruder into our family's lives that may not be fully welcome. The popcorn was distributed into over sized plastic cups saved from stops at McDonald's on the way home from Fairbanks. Even the anxious dog was served a share in a bowl. We all agreed that it was amazing to have popcorn as a treat of near instant gratification.

My parents had it repaired over buying a new one when it faltered in the mid-90s, and it lasted into the late 2000s. A microwave has been in my kitchen ever since, but sometimes I am reminded of the excitement of the night we got that first microwave. I have attempted to share this memory with others, but I generally have to find an older generation to appreciate the memory.  I know I was not alone in my amazement at the late arrival of the microwave that evening, as until her dying day, the family dog regarded the smell of butter flavor and the ding of the microwave as an indication of shared popcorn.

Fat Kid

I do not remember the first time I was called fat as a kid. I remember in third grade, Danny, a rail thin kid calling me fat mercilessly. I complained to my mom about it, she listened, and eventually offered that I could make fun of him for being so skinny. Offering the quip, “you're so skinny you have to run around in the shower to get wet.” My mother and I laughed about that, but the reality remains that the fat kid gets made fun of, and the skinny kid doesn't.

Like the extra weight that earned my monicker, “fat kid” stuck. Eventually, I would learn to appreciate being called fat over other names, because I was not trying to hide being fat. In fact, I owned being fat. While other kids were fatter, I could comfortably hate myself publicly for not having a perfect body. Beyond the body shape, I think much of it had to do with being bad at sports. My fatness stemmed not necessarily from my body mass index, but from my inability to hit a small leather ball with a wooden rod, or to not be able to put an orange ball through an elevated orange metal ring. Could I have worked on these, my brother did, so probably, but I can think of nothing less interesting than a group of people committed to the movement of a ball on a court or field.

This attitude does not win prized pecking order posts within the school age community. I was picked last for every game in PE, which was almost always matball, a variation of kickball that I was no better at than the original. Even amongst my cousins I was the game loser in the group of four. Fat transcended the states, and while I was certainly the fattest of my two cousins and Jason, it was really commentary on my prowess at the games that we played.

Accordingly, I abhorred the playing of team sports, and really the existence of these sports in general. In high school, desperate to fit in, I shot rifle, a sport that is “team” only once the scores are tallied. While shooting is not easy, the ability to lay, kneel, and stand in one place for many hours fails to convince almost everyone of unfatness. To increase my marketability to my peers, I was talked into playing baseball my freshman year.

For many of the baseball games that season I was player number ten, meaning that my presence on the team ensured that we would not forfeit. The coach could not be begrudged to play me saving the one inning that another player angered him to the point that he put me in to punish him. Given our record that year, there may have been more dignity for the team if they had forfeited, but Jason got to play baseball his senior year, so wearing tight pants, and watching his games was worth going out.

I never actually played long enough to have a record, and I don't think anyone but parents and girlfriends ever came to a baseball game. Accordingly, baseball did nothing to save me from being a fat kid. What did was Landen. Landen was a smart kid with little ambition in his studies, who chose instead to apply himself to the avoidance of school. To help him and his friends, he needed the credibility of a nerdy kid who never did anything wrong. Landen got my services, in an unspoken exchange of credibility. I could give his antics the cover they needed, and in return he could give me a moniker that was not derogatory. Fat kid, fag, and nerd were nearly replaced by Bad Ass.

Bad Ass, a misnomer that fit my initials, and “BA” for short, became more commonly used than my own name. It was so pervasive in the high school that adults began calling me BA to avoid confusion with the other Brians of my small home town. While the names changed, and somehow being known as Bad Ass seemed to trick a few people into perceiving me as being bad ass, inside, I knew that I was not Bad Ass, I knew that I was still the same fat kid that had been ridiculed for his entire public life.

The fear of being found out is, in many ways, worse than the fear of actually being something. While I was never happy being the fat kid in my class, I was not afraid of losing much. I was already at the bottom of the pecking order. Once I became BA, I had something to lose. I began attempting to hide myself even more than I already was. I was no longer trying to preserve myself as fat, but as actually some sort of cool. I embraced the idea of a Chris Farley or John Belushi, certainly nerdy, certainly not athletic, but cool all the same. The problem with this is that I was not cool, and I knew it.

Belushi and Farley tried to be cool so much that they killed themselves in the process, so even my role models saw the flaw in their cover. My escape was not drugs, but college. In the later years of high school I segregated myself from the students that I had spent my life with. I worked jobs with fervor, and avoided contact with people outside of a small group of friends. I took less than a full load of courses, and graduated early to move away from the fear of being discovered. What I had not realized is that I had become accustomed to running.

In university I would restyle myself as a climber, and general outdoors enthusiast. Like today's hipster kids, I was desperate to find a group that would never think to discover my weaknesses. If everything I did was physical, no one would think that I was actually the fat kid. I started riding my bike, and in an attempt to impress a girl, started running. I was active in white water, and a bunch of clubs. I was anything but the fat kid, and I would sometimes start to trick myself into believing my own cover story, like the undercover cop in so many movies.

With time I would find mountain biking, and distance running. These days I do not climb very much, and my mountain bike sits disassembled in a storage unit in Western Washington. I keep running though. My weight fluctuates with other factors in my life, but I have been able to do some long and beautiful runs. Rationally, I doubt many of the kids who called me fat so long ago could keep up, but that does not matter. Out on the trail, running for the joy of running is never far ahead of running away from the insults of childhood. Sometimes I find myself putting a hand against my stomach, comforted and disgusted to find that my gut has not magically faded since the beginning of my run. Instead I feel an extended truffle shuffle, jiggling along the trail with me. Some days this motivates me to push a little harder, to run a little faster to stay ahead of the past, but most days, a voice inside of me says, “I know who you are, you're the fat kid,” and my run slows to a defeated walk.