From Oklahoma City to Boston

Twenty-four hours after two bombs went off during the Boston marathon, President Obama and American talking heads and commentators are still walking on eggshells. They displayed a remarkable restraint in coming up with hypotheses, plots and guesses as to the identity of the makers of this terrible carnage.

Two days later, in Boston we are light years away from Oklahoma City.

Remember Oklahoma City? On April 19, 1995, a bomb left in a truck planted by a Gulf War veteran with ties to extreme-right militants exploded in front of a federal building downtown. The record: 168 dead, including 19 children, and 680 wounded.

Some hours after this devastating explosion, rumors of an Islamic plot spread like wildfire on the American networks. This attack “has the Middle East written all over,” an FBI agent stated without any hesitation, unleashing a tsunami of smoky theories, putting Hamas, jihad, Jordan and Saddam Hussein center-stage, whoa!

In one column I wrote that the snowballing had only started. And how! Immediately, and without any supporting evidence, except for the devastating evidence caused by the bomb, they talked about a highly sophisticated explosive engine engineered by a genius of international terrorism. Two days later, however, we learned that it had actually been a homemade bomb made with fertilizer. Not quite the same thing.

The “breaking news,” the quick conclusions, approximations, hasty judgments, shortcuts and other narrative excesses went on for more than a week before the truth, a more complex strand, began to emerge.

For a moment, American media became hysterical and unprofessional.

All things considered, Oklahoma City’s bitter lesson seems to have borne fruit 18 years later. That is much better, even if our thirst for knowledge must delay being satisfied. That is better, even if we must put up with the loops of eyewitness accounts repeating the same thing over and over again. That is better, especially because the tragic events of Boston will have had the advantage of sparing us the lies and the shortcuts.

A century hasn’t passed from Oklahoma City to Boston, just 18 years, which saw the emergence of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, so many tools that allow every excess, from posting bloody photos such as the terrible one of the poor runner with the tattered legs, the skin torn off, bones shattered, that popped up almost everywhere on the social networks. That also goes for the depressing celebrity tweets, where every celebrity from Arnold to Oprah, including Katy Perry, Justin Timberlake, Ben Affleck and the gang, felt obligated to react to the tragedy in Boston and give us their prayers, thoughts and other clichés.

Yet, in this saturated sea of well-wishes, I stumbled across the text of a comedian whom I had never heard of before named Patton Oswalt. I will never know why I clicked on his message. For one thing, I wasn’t alone. In the space of 24 hours, his message went viral as if people had found his words to be a powerful antidote to the despair in the heat of the moment.

“I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, ‘Well, I’ve had it with humanity,’’” wrote Oswalt. “But I was wrong. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago … The good outnumber you, and we always will.”

The most important thing Patton Oswalt said is that it matters little if the attackers in Boston are one, two or a hundred; their number will still be dwarfed by the hundreds and the billions of humans who came to the aid of their fellow people on that day.

A century hasn’t passed from Oklahoma City to Boston, just 18 years of shocks, tragedies and senseless deaths that, at the final count, in spite of everything and in spite of us, never had a better reason for hope and for life.