BEIJING – The disquieting news snaked through the American sectors of these Olympic Games quickly. The first reflex, of course, is to fear the worst. That is the lesson of our times.
The lesson of past Olympics, and past intrusions upon them, is something else. We don’t merely jump to conclusions, we somersault after them.
An American is killed, another is critically wounded. That much we do know. It is what we don’t yet know that chills. Were they targets? Were they guilty of the crime of being an American in a time when some consider that a capital offense?
These are natural questions, as well as unsettling ones. There is a segment of the soul that aches at the thought that Todd Bachman, father-in-law of US volleyball coach Hugh McCutcheon, died in a random fluke, a wrong-place, wrong-time accident of fate.
But it is ever more horrifying to believe it wasn’t.
It is ever more appalling to ponder the darker elements that could have made this happen, to wait for hidden messages from the underbelly of the human soul. Once, that would have seemed paranoid. Not so much lately.
Now we sit, and we wait, and we listen to Chinese officials insist that this was the handiwork of a lone madman, and we know that, whatever else you say about them, they do have a record of protecting foreigners’ lives on their soil, if not their own citizens’ basic rights.
And we hope they are right.
Because the alternative is just too calamitous to explore.