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The Badger Herald

Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

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Explosions provide lessons in solidarity, tolerance

Runners often say that running is its own reward. After a long day of thinking, reading or arguing with peers, it’s refreshing to lace up your shoes and march to your own drummer. Your body, your music, your pace. Running releases daily stress, gives you a sense of control and does wonders for your attitude and your character (not to mention your abs). It’s an everyday affirmation that you can make your world better one step at a time, no matter from where you start.

As anyone who has ever participated in or attended a competitive racing event knows, one of the appeals is the camaraderie. Running around Madison for exercise is fun. Running through throngs of cheering onlookers on a race day surrounded by a cohort of fellow dashers is downright stimulating.

Moreover, observing the selflessness of a race day environment is akin to getting a booster shot of optimism. People and corporations volunteer loads of time and money to make each event a success. Kids hand out water and Gatorade to complete strangers, adults stick around to pick up trash and first responders are always on scene to assist in the case of a medical emergency. It makes you hopeful that, if placed in the proper mindset, humans can accomplish positive, productive goals at negligible costs.

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On Monday, we saw all these attributes on display in Boston. When two bombs exploded less than 15 seconds apart, killing three and injuring more than 170, the news spread like wildfire. By the end of the day, you would have been hard pressed to find someone who did not have a visceral and immediate reaction to the killings.

These immediate reactions to such senseless suffering come from a very deep place. As Ezra Klein wrote in the Washington Post, “If you are losing faith in human nature today, watch what happens in the aftermath of an attack on the Boston Marathon. The flood of donations crashed the Red Cross’s Web site. The organization tweeted that its blood supplies are already full. People are lining up outside of Tufts Medical Center to try and help.”

The human ability to band together when a crisis strikes is one of our oldest and noblest characteristics. When a group you identify with is attacked, you’re much more likely to assist them than you are to assist a similarly aggrieved group you don’t identify with. This is true to a fault. The deaths of three Americans, if media coverage is any indication, matter a lot more to the average American than say, the deaths of 55 Iraqis under (relatively) similar circumstances.

Another pernicious underside exists to this group cohesion: The desire to protect our own can result in the unnecessary exclusion of outsiders. This paradox underlies debates on things like immigration reform and the Park51 Islamic Community Center in New York, which opponents refer to as a “Ground Zero mosque.” Harm done unto people that resemble us by people that don’t makes us more likely to be wary and distrusting of that out-group in the future. In all these cases, it’s apparent these evolutionary useful abilities (group formation and cohesion) can be brought to dogmatic extremes that stray from what’s helpful (distrust of all outsiders).

An appreciation of this phenomenon is essential to understanding the reactions of some of our countrymen. Some, like Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, used the attacks to stress the need for more stringent background checks on foreign nationals and tougher guidelines for student visas, despite the complete lack of evidence that a foreign national perpetrated the attacks and that one of the three dead, Lu Lingzi, was a foreign student. Others, like some passengers aboard an American Airlines flight from Boston to Chicago that departed later in the day, were spooked enough by the mere presence of two Arabic-speaking men that the plane returned to the gate and the Arabic speakers were escorted off.

Let’s make sure we don’t learn the wrong lessons from Monday’s events in Boston. America can either crack down and shut the world out, or prove that our resilience is second to none by staying free and open. America became the nation it is by espousing these virtues, not by being closed and insecure. If we’re really the land of the free and home of the brave, let’s show it by making it easier, not harder, for foreign students to obtain a visa. We’ll never be completely secure, but we can make America a better place for people of all stars and stripes, one step at a time.

Nathaniel Olson ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in political science, history and psychology. 

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