Why Terrorists Kill...................Arion

After reading about the Boston explosion, I sat and thought for a while, and wondered why somebody would do it. The more I pondered, the more I realized that terrorists are not just a mass of frothing maniacs with deadly weapons. They are desperate, frantic people with a sense of dislocation. The world seems out of balance to them. So, I wondered, what is that dislocation? What makes them do it? After a lot of thought, I think I've got it. Here are my thoughts:

A terrorist kills because he's powerless. He is inside an event or an organization or a nation that is bigger than he is, and it is moving faster than he can adjust. He feels himself at the center of a whirlwind, and so he lashes out, trying to stop the winds of change. The bomb is a symbol of his anger. He wants the world to be familiar, and he thinks that by destroying some small part of it he can bring the world back into something he can make sense of.

In a Western, democratic system, there are a large number of safety valves for the disaffected people. Civil protests, petitions, bills introduced into a legislative body, all of these are peaceful forms of recourse. When these options fail, there another one: those who cannot compete in the high-velocity, internet-driven world of today simply "opt-out". They move into farming communities, or adopt a subsistence lifestyle. They sell their homes, pack up their belongings and go elsewhere. Go into a bookstore and you will find a dozen books about people who abandoned big cities for peaceful, country living. Their lives move at a slower pace, but they have achieved a form of sanity that had previously escaped.

Others keep to the lives they have, but adopt a simpler pattern. Some people simply choose not to use Facebook, or any of the social media platforms in their daily lives. Instead, they work through the slower method of face-to-face communications. Their work usually consists of service-oriented work: baristas, greeters, receptionists, etc.

But what about the ones who feel they can't do any of that? What about the disparate, desperate people who feel that the world is passing them by? They see twenty-somethings making billions from trading insubstantial bytes of information. They hear stories about oil companies fracking underground, and turning water faucets into jets of flame, and getting away with it. They see children--perhaps their own--mouthing the words of movie stars and bouncing around the room to music that they cannot understand, and suddenly it's all too much. Invisible walls crowd them, strange smells attack them, noises that you or I would shrug off sound like cannon fire, and they begin to scream, begging for just five minutes of silence! And what do people around them do? They glance at the person, shrug, and walk away, dismissing the drowning man as somebody on drugs.

To the disaffected man (or woman), that must feel like the final insult! They resolve to strike back at the cold, unfeeling world that seems like a moster from a nightmare. Strike it down, smash it, and bring the world back into focus.

No, I'm not a terrorist. I think people who plant bombs need to be punished. They need to turn their energies into creative, peaceful demonstrations. But I also believe that the Internet has created a world which has robbed us of the ability to interact with each other. We communicate via microbursts of words and acronyms intended to convey entire sentences, and those who don't do that are considered weird or out of step. In effect, we're now using technology as a measuring-stick for our fellow man. But you can't compress the human spirit into a couple of bytes on a hard drive. Nor should we try!

Perhaps that is why the bombs are going off more frequently. Some people are refusing to be technologized, and they think this is the only way to get the attention of the world. If that's the case, then humanity is truly in a Frankenstein situation: we have created a monster whose victims are using the oldest language in the world to communicate: violence!

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