Left Side of the Aisle #118 - Part 9

That Rolling Stone cover

One quick thing before I close. I have just enough time to squeeze this in.

You have undoubtedly seen this picture. This is the cover of Rolling Stone, with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover and people have been upset by this.

I want to suggest to you, and I want you to think about this, that the reason people are upset by this cover is because he looks like a good-looking kid - which he is.

The thing is, in the photo he doesn’t look evil, he doesn’t look foreign, he doesn’t look “other,” he doesn’t look “not us.” He looks like someone you might have known, someone your daughter might have dated in college, someone who could have been patted on the cheek by some cliché grandmother going "What a good boy!"

And we can’t deal with the fact that somebody who could be a good-looking kid, who doesn’t look foreign or evil or "other," could actually have done what he did. The problem for most of us is not, as has been claimed, that the picture "glamorizes" him, it's that it normalizes him.

You think about that and you think about your reactions to that.