IMO, when we have an anxiety provoking crisis in our society, "we" need to reduce that anxiety, and "we" do that by telling ourselves stories. It's not unlike the soothing stories our parents told us when "we" were kids, because at our caregivers' knee is where "we" learned what is to be and how to model being empathetic and soothing.
As kids "we" were taught life is unfair...bad people can do bad things to good people. "We" are soothed by being told "we" did nothing to deserve this bad, "we" are good people. And so the soothing narrative takes on attributes of the fundamental 'us' vs 'them' conflict foundational to sociology.
"We" empathetic good guys layer on adjectives of goodness about the victims, the 1st responders, the surgeons, the hospitals because all the good helpers are like"we". Just reread Obama's statements about the Boston bombing; whoever wrote those statements laid it on the good attributes very thick.
On the other side of the narrative "we" must distinguish ourselves from "them", the bad people who did this bad thing.
Without any evidence of who the bad people are, "we" are left to fill in the blank, and "we" fill it in with descriptors we have previously judged to be usefully applied to bad people. Pre--judged socially acceptable names...that serve as fillers of the void.
Which is to say, "we" tap prejudice for a supply of nouns, pronouns and adjectives that label the 'them' as bad.
And that is the rub: soothing anxiety in these situations where "we" must guess about the bad guys comes comes down to employing prejudices.
From our early days as children we have learned a lexicon that can be employed when we need to display 'prejudiced loyalty or support for one's own cause or group' (which btw is the very definition of chauvinism--the fancy word for bigotry).
Being tolerant, reasonable, dare I say even liberal adults, "we" know that we shouldn't say prejudicial things about a person's gender or race or ethnicity or religion. Those things get jumped on by others of 'us' and are thereby removed from the narrative.
But "we" REALLY need to make expressions of loyalty and support that distinguish 'us' from the bad 'them'. It's about being a member of the good guys.
What's left among our prejudiced vocabularies to fill in the blank?
Well noun, pronouns, adjectives and other modifiers for bad/criminal persons and those with mental problems who 'we' are prejudiced to believe don't/can't think good thoughts like 'us'.
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