Within 20 minutes former FBI profiler & MSNBC expert blamed a crazy person for Boston bombing

[HereSince1628]

Advocates for the mentally ill can pick and choose among what words or stigmatizing phrases really piss them off, but all that verbiage is really nothing compared to the sustained maintenance of prejudicial attitudes against the mentally ill.

Within the hour DUers began speculating...one of the first posts took liberty to blame either Muslims, RW American religious fanatics, or the 'criminally insane'.

DUers quickly jumped into that recreation warning DUers to not be too quick to blame religions or ethnicities for the bombing.

Not so much concern for the mentally ill.

And it's not just pundits or DUers....

This morning in a homage post to members of the Milwaukee Light Brigade who stood in last night's rain with their light sign "We Mourn With Boston", comments of comedian/writer Patton Oswalt were posted as an outstanding example of an empathetic response to Boston bombing. That outstanding example including this rationale for the bombing:

"the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they're pointed towards darkness."

Snarled wiring? Yes, a euphemism for some fantasized mental defect of structure or function.

I do understand the motivations for this. Dead people, horrible pictures of horrible wounds. People ARE upset.

The people need to escape a very tough emotional space. As is typical, attempts to lessen emotional pain will come through constructing and believing in narratives that places 'us' with the good guys, opposed to 'them', the bad guys. So within hours we have the marathon runners elevated to 'the best people in America' and the unknown party that committed the bombing reduced to "the worst people in America" by Al Sharpton and Mike Barnacle.

Thankfully we don't have to guess re to what class those worst people belong. Cliff Van Zandt, nothing less than a former FBI profiler has already used the credibility of that former job to proclaim the person who committed the bombing was a crazy person.

So, I guess I am over-reacting, pissed off by an unusual event.

Well no, not really. This built in default attitude is ubiquitous.

For example, just about an hour before the Boston Bombing, I was listening to Ed Schultz on his radio show. He was lamenting that background check law might not pass the senate.

Big Ed was OK with Assault Weapons ban failing,
he seemed to be ok on allowing high capacity magazines to continue being sold.
What had Eddie's undies in a bundle was the possibility of not getting a law for enhanced background checks.

Why?

Because as Bid Ed stated for himself, he wants better background checks to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill!

You see. It's really not at all about stigmatizing words. It's about prejudicial attitudes, it's about social cues which require being filled in by stigmatizing words. It's about the construction of rationalizing narratives of 'them' that default to the nameless, faceless, dangerous lunatics among us.

It's about the application of that narrative as the rhetoric of national problem solving, the social endorsement and institutionalization of discrimination.

And it's accepted because through it society can have a narrative that like a lullaby, rocks them into peaceful comfort at the end of the news.