I live in the Boston area, and the most soul-sucking thing I had to do on Monday was pick my way through conspiracy theorist garbage to find status updates from friends saying they were OK.
Fortunately, somebody out there saw the same kooks, and stuck it to them in a way they had coming.
The blood on the sidewalk hadn’t even dried when people like Alex Jones immediately started tweeting about how it was a “false flag” operation, the CIA was behind it, and people standing on roofs and chemtrails and whatever. Snopes has a good rundown of the B.S. as usual. These are the kind of people who crash a press conference instead of doing anything useful like donating blood or volunteering their apartment so those displaced had somewhere to go.
So you’d think the URL BostonMarathonConspiracy.com would lead to this lunacy. It doesn’t. Instead it leads to this:
PLEASE KEEP THE VICTIMS OF THIS EVENT
AND THEIR FAMILIES IN YOUR THOUGHTSTHANK YOU
Some text, since removed, explains that the domain squatter bought the site specifically to keep it away from the kind of jerk who has to make it about his politics, not those injured.
If there’s a more simple, elegant gesture that helps to keep the focus where it belongs, on those injured and killed, instead of on the sideshow of people screaming at each other than any tragedy inevitably turns into for those not directly affected by it, I haven’t thought of one. More to the point, it gave everybody rattled by this event a good laugh.
Cheers, my friend, wherever you may be. Know that it’s appreciated.