OpEd: Rolling Stone’s Dzhokhar Tsarnaev cover

I knew people at the Boston Marathon. My dad and a few other people I knew ran it. My friend volunteered at the finish line. My family waited for my dad in the stands. And I was shocked and angry when a Canadian posted the following status on Facebook on April 15:

“55 people killed in a bombing in Iraq. 30 people killed in a US-initiated bombing in Afghanistan. 20 people killed in a bombing in Damascus. 3 people killed in a bombing Boston. Which news story makes the headlines?”

Could the average American be better informed about events in the Middle East? Probably. But to me it seemed clear that no one has the right to criticize grief, fear, and anger over a senseless act of violence; certainly not when people are still waiting to hear if there are more bombs in the city, if the bomber has been caught, or if loved ones are alive.

Yet I was just as shocked and angry when I saw, at TheCelebrityCafe, celebrity reactions to the Rolling Stone cover with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and the update here that a number of stores refused to carry the edition.
Do the victims of the Boston Marathon deserve recognition? Absolutely. Should the Tsarnaev brothers be glorified? Absolutely not. But Rolling Stone in no way glorified Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; it used a clear photograph of him on the front page to illustrate its main story. And that piece is not sympathetic towards the remaining Tsarnaev brother—it’s the full details of the story contextualizing the bombing, which no one else has yet covered. Rejecting that story on any grounds is choosing to be ignorant.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is only a few months older than I am. I can’t imagine myself in his shoes, willing to kill innocents for a cause. But then, I can’t imagine myself in the shoes of the President, his advisors, or the Secretary of Defense, because they all make the same decision, regularly, about innocent civilians abroad, some of whom are American. See, for example, the NYTimes.

There are many things wrong here, and the more we know about the Tsarnaevs, the more we know about how to prevent anything like this in the future. And however much we may want to demonize Dzhokhar, he is a kid, like me, who loved his family, like most humans, and did something terribly, awfully wrong.