On the Tsarnaev Trial Verdict

     I was about to leave a school club yesterday afternoon when a kid lifted his computer to show us the screen, with a Twitter news alert which read "Boston bomber sentenced to death."
     The room went silent, and I just felt this seeping exhaustion, like turning around a corner on an easy walk to find a sudden grueling uphill. I closed my eyes.
     I don't know which I would rather wish for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: death or a life condemned to the US prison system. I am appalled to find myself wondering whether the latter might be the worse option, that the death penalty of all things could be mercy for this young man.
     With how horrible this affair has been--and I mean the entire affair, not just the bombings but the atmosphere afterwards, the SWAT team manhunt through Watertown, the media's portrayal of the event and the perpetrators, the rapid, ubiquitous adoption of Boston Strong, the calls for capital punishment from people I thought would have abhorred such an institution--I might be glad that it's drawing to a close, but I am still sickened that this is how it is ending.
     And it is not even really over: the media was exclaiming this morning that an appeal could take ten years--so a decade from now, all this frenzy, all this pumped-up patriotism, all this shallow appropriated sorrow, all of it could be dredged back up for us to feed on. So we can continue to fear sensationally for our country and ourselves, to support or pity the victims but never seek the deeper causes of their suffering, to condemn the bombers and their religion with no soul-searching of our own.
     I am also reminded that the family of a victim of the bombing specifically asked that Tsarnaev be kept alive and made to spend his life in prison rather than receive the death penalty. Beyond all helpless fury or bitter sadness I feel over the verdict, it is denying the families the closure they asked for. What kind of closure beyond a sick satisfaction could the death penalty ever bring us?
     The US is the only country in this hemisphere with the death penalty. Think about that. Think about our foreign policy of capital punishment, too--all the wrong-place-wrong-time crimes around the world that have been penalized by death thanks to the US military machine. Think about civilians incinerated in Pakistan by drones; think about prisoners tortured in Iraq; think about every leader we've overthrown and every country on which we've visited chaos, violence and unendurable suffering. Think of how very much we've done to provoke hatred.
     I don't condone the Boston Marathon bombing. I grieve the dead and wounded, and I remember that day well; my father and brother were barely a few blocks away when the explosions went off, and it was terrifying when they called me to assure me they were safe while I watched muddled, panicked news reports of bombs and death hit the internet. But if the brothers truly were acting out of fury at the US's overseas activities...how can I say they did not have just cause?
     9/11 was blowback, mostly-unforeseen consequences of this country's actions--consequences few expected and fewer connected the dots for. Our collective response consisted, unhelpfully, of more of the same policies that provoked the attack. The Boston Bombing response was not, of course, as severe--we didn't start two wars, for one--but the same deprivation of context is evident. Acts of terror are rarely entirely senseless and groundless. They only appear that way because we lack the context to understand their motivations. Disproportional, irrational, futile it may be, but terror in the general political sense springs from deep wounds of injustice, which are rarely in the public eye. This lack of understanding only creates a breeding ground for more blowback. An endless positive feedback loop of destruction, if you will.
     I also suppose the Tsarnaev trial jurors might have been thinking of themselves and the repercussions they personally could face from fanatics who would have been furious to see Tsarnaev live. It's the patriotic thing, I suppose. The need to feel vindicated, to imagine that "justice"--in this country so devoid of it--has been served up, like dead meat on a dinner plate.
     Eye for an eye, are you happy now? Just as everyone wanted--more collateral damage, so many wrongs that will never be made right. Eye for an eye.
     No wonder this country is blind.