ADDICTION AND BOSTON

THE GREAT ADDICTION isn't drugs, alcohol, sex, religion or even money. The most abused addiction is Drama. Every parent of a teenager, especially in the new era of entitled children and laissez fair parenting, should recognize this. Give any kid the tiniest opening for High Drama and he/she will make the most of it.

There's a counter-intuitive factor, here: Drama is desirable whether it's positive or negative. Over and over we watch our children and our grandchildren "stir the pot" to their own disadvantage; they seize an opportunity for spinning up the drama even when they know they'll lose privileges, make us angry, alienate themselves from friends. Drama – high-contrast life, crisis, anxiety, wailing, pain – is more seductive than quiet approval. "Please, God, rescue me from normal!" In many, many young people drugs and alcohol are merely symptoms of drama addiction.

Of course kids live in a world of exaggerated drama. They take their cues from frantically dramatic music and, I'm ashamed to say, from current journalism.

I still consider myself a journalist, and I still regard journalism as one of the noblest professions. But I was embarrassed for my profession as I watched the "coverage" of the Boston bomb incident (note the exclusion of the word "massacre" or "terrorist" or "attack"). Even sober veterans like Wolf Blitzer were scratching and begging for sensationalist, flammable material, the ghosts of maybe-truths, "opinion" and speculation, snap-crackle-and-pop to fill the space between commercials.

The public and official reaction was hyperbolic. Tanks in the streets of Boston (okay, APCs), "lockdowns," and de facto martial law out of 1984. The jumped-up "security" did NOT help capture the culprits; brother 1 was mortally wounded during a sudden firefight; brother 2 was noticed by an emerging citizen after the lockdown, and might have been noticed far earlier on streets with pedestrians and normal traffic. The fact is that the officials wanted to stir the drama pot, as well, to look authoritative and feel powerful, to trot out their black vests and crisis faces, "Back into your homes! This is the police!" Cops want drama, too, and only serious training can convince a law officer not to overreact to every situation. No one in charge of the Boston Incident counseled against overreaction. Everyone had a fine old melodrama.

More fact: We've dramatized ourselves into more domestic terrorism. Copycat, homegrown, wannabe jihadists will now come out of the woodwork to embrace the fame and esteem (remember, "good" drama and "bad" drama are equally appealing) the Chechyan Brothers got, and will hope that an afternoon's work will bring them into a blaze of attention. Forget self-interest, fear of death, and common law. Leaping onto the world stage is an emotional lightning storm, not a discussion group.

The only hope we have to avoid constant domestic strikes is to drain the drama from our electrified anchor-people, to promote sober and factual reporting of facts, filter out speculation and rumor, to minimize sensationalism and sentimentalism in sidebar interviews and features, and to portray "terrorists" as largely half-baked neurotics rather than blazing dragons of evil. Leave "evil" to sermons. Killers are garden-variety whackadoodles and don't deserve vast terms. Call a sicko a sicko, not a glittering demon.

We don't need the might and glory and authority of a super-power nation to suppress violence. This will only yield a police state (Boston during the lockdown) and more drama, more reasons to rebel against The Man. Who will come forth, please, as a sober, calm Grampa Walton to settle our fears and refocus our panic toward getting back to our work? We need maturity much more than Sensational New Developments After the Commercial!

Braxinoso Speaks:

Himself is making sense. We lived on those Boston streets and know those people. The brothers who planted crude bombs, in a pitiful attempt at glory, and the overlarge "crisis team" of officials took Boston for a softer, more sheeplike city. Traditionally (and that's Boston all over) that city doesn't take kindly to royal OR federal mandates and martial control. One Revolution started there. Another is due.