If you've visited a right-leaning blog or received email from your conservative uncle recently, chances are good you've seen a photograph of a car with a "Coexist" bumper sticker that's alleged to be the car carjacked by one of the Boston Marathon bombers. It's not. And, even if it was, getting some kind of creepy glee from the sticker being on the car would make you a colossal dick.
Let's tackle the facts first: Here's the picture being circulated on sites like the Daily Caller:
That's the car they're claiming was highjacked by the Boston Marathon Bombers. It has a "Coexist" bumper sticker, and the bombers were Chechen Muslims, two facts which make the people who send this picture around feel all tingly in their bathroom areas and think is very, very funny. That car is also a Mazda Protegé.
The hijacked car in question wasn't a Mazda at all. It was an SUV, and people seem to be confusing this small, Japanese sedan with this small, Japanese sedan:
... which is clearly not the same car. The car above, which was at the scene of the shootout, was the bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaez' personal Honda Civic. It's clearly not the same car — just look at how the taillights are split on the body and trunk on the Civic, and aren't on the Mazda. Also interesting to note: there's no Coexist bumper sticker on Tsarnaez' car. That's probably because — and this is just a hunch — much like readers of Red State and Daily Caller, I don't think Tsarnaez really identifies with that particular bumper sticker. He seems more like a Calvin-peeing-on-something kind of guy.
You'd think this wouldn't be rocket science to figure out, but it's pretty clear there's a good number of people who really, really want a Coexist bumper sticker on there. People like Adam Carolla, who really should be able to tell the difference between two cars. Here's Carolla delightedly talking about the non-existent bumper sticker on the O'Reilly Factor:
Adam's clearly excited/aroused (based on pupil dilation) by this. Which makes him a dick. Here's why:
Let's break down what it would mean if, hypothetically, the hijacked car actually had a Coexist bumper sticker:
• Someone who owns the car thinks it'd be great if people who thought different ways got along
• That someone had his/her life threatened and their car hijacked
• As a result someone who thinks people should be nice to each other had something very not nice done to them, and somehow this is funny. Or at least "ironic."
If that's your pattern of thought, come on, that kind of makes you a dickhead. Nice person + life threatened by zealot = funny? Really, hypothetical dipshit? Whether or not you actually think people who think differently can get along, what's with the degree of delight that this happened to an innocent person?
In that video clip, Carolla expresses his issues with the bumper sticker, saying it "could be shortened quite a bit, maybe to just "Co." Which means he just wants it to include the Islam and Peace symbols? Sure, whatever floats your boat, Adam.
You'd think if anyone could understand the value of divergent things coexisting, it'd be Adam Carolla, since the 80% of him whose greatest contribution to humankind is processing buffet food into rich, healthy nightsoil coexists with the 20% of him that has spectacular taste in cars and a really terrific car collection.
Carolla also suggests that if the car that didn't actually have the Coexist bumper sticker instead didn't actually have a "This Car Is Protected By Smith And Wesson" bumper sticker, the car wouldn't have been hijacked. Which of course, is true, since carjackers use bumper stickers as their primary deciding factor of what car to hijack. I think they even have a reference book that ranks the bumper stickers to the worthiness of the car to hijack. Fun fact: the #1 ranked sticker is "How's My Driving? Call 1-800-EATSHIT."
This whole thing is just embarrassing, not just because it's not even true, but because the fundamental thought process behind it is so stupid and awful. Coexisting with idiots who don't believe exactly what you do is what America is all about. We've been doing just that for over 200 years. And, every religion has its miserable bastards: Islam has its bomb-hiding extremists, Christianity has the funeral-ruining Westboro Baptist Church, Jews have ultra-ultra Orthodox communities that treat women like crap, and on and on and on, a beautiful chain of embarrassing fuckwads polluting some small portion of every faith.
I'm not saying I'm ever likely to put a Coexist sticker on my car (no room left with all the variants of "If this car's a rockin'..." stickers) but if anyone thinks that the sticker on the back of someone's car means it's funny they had a gun pointed to their head, there's some fucking off they can avail themselves to, out back, behind the dumpster full of steaming excrement.
(Thanks, Steven!)