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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/04/19/a-chaotic-and-unnerving-week-in-american-history/A chaotic and unnerving week in American history
Posted by Joel Achenbach on April 19, 2013 at 12:18 pm
snip//
This may have been the most chaotic and unnerving week in recent American history. An Elvis impersonator mailed poison letters to Washington (as many people have noted, Elvis would never do a thing like that). And in West, Texas, a fertilizer plant exploded as if hit with a small nuclear bomb, killing an unknown number of people and leveling multiple city blocks.
It seems that the third week in April has become our time of calamity. The Branch Davidian fire (1993), Oklahoma City (1995), Columbine (1999), Virginia Tech (2007), the BP oil spill (2010) and now the Boston Marathon bombings all took place between April 15 and 20. For that matter, the Texas City fertilizer explosion of 1947, Americas worst industrial accident, happened on April 16. Pattern? The Oklahoma City bombing was timed to be on the anniversary of Waco, but otherwise its a fluke, a coincidence that the country can hope will fade away amid many peaceful Aprils to come.
snip//
A striking feature of this weeks news has been misinformation. Thats been present with every big breaking story for many years, including 9/11, when Washingtonians heard incorrect reports of explosions at the State Department, the Capitol and the USA Today building. What was different this week was social media, which sped up the misinformation metabolism. The New York Post took the prize by putting two innocent guys on the front page, saying their picture had been circulated by authorities. The executive editor later defended the decision by saying that the paper never called them suspects. Journalistically, not an auspicious moment.
Big stories spawn mistakes. The social-media search for the Boston bombers revealed that even a crowdsourced investigation, with myriad eyeballs scanning countless images, can manage to come up with nothing but misleading or erroneous theories.
National tragedies are rarely so prolonged, so unbounded. We come to expect that, after the horror, there will be a period of mourning, an attempt at closure, perhaps a church service with remarks by the consoler-in-chief. But on this Friday the story still has no ending, and more families are grieving, and no one knows how this will play out.
As they say: Developing.
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"As they say: Developing." (Original Post)
babylonsister
Apr 2013
OP
This may have been the most chaotic and unnerving week in recent American history?
liberal N proud
Apr 2013
#1
liberal N proud
(60,300 posts)1. This may have been the most chaotic and unnerving week in recent American history?
Chaotic? Yes
Unnerving? Most probably
Most chaotic in recent history? Define recent.
To the people directly effected by these incidents, it was the most chaotic and unnerving week. But for all of America, I doubt it.