Yesterday, I set up my perfunctory tax day blog post and scheduled it to appear in the evening, then I set out to run a bunch of errands. Little did I know that a horrific terrorist attack had taken place at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. What a horror.
My heart goes out to the people of Boston, a city which I have loved since I was a small child. While my dad was in grad school, my family lived in the Boston suburb of Waltham, and we often took trips to the inner city, with visits to Boston Common being a particular treat. Make Way for Ducklings, a quintessential Boston classic, has been a favorite book of mine since childhood. Throughout the years, Boston has been a familiar destination for me. My sister and my good friend J-Co both attended college in the Boston metro area, so I could always count on a bunch of friends piling into somebody's car for a weekend road trip to the Boston environs.
I have many happy memories of hanging out at Faneuil Hall, lounging on the Governement Center steps, crossing the Smoot Bridge to Cambridge, making a pilgrimage to see "Old Ironsides", taking the T to the suburbs to see friends. Boston has long been a "second home" to me. To think that someone would attack happy marathon attendees, who came from all over the world to cheer on the runners, on Patriots' Day makes me heartsick.
Here's keeping the people of Boston in my thoughts, and hoping that the perpetrator of this fould deed is caught and brought to justice.
POSTSCRIPT: I am in awe at the heroism of the first responders and the civilians on the scene who stepped up and began administering to the wounded in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. To think that someone, having run the marathon, would then proceed immediately to the hospital to donate blood is mind-boggling.
I'd read this AM (ThinkP?) that runners in the med shack for dehydration ripped IVs out to free up cots for wounded.
ReplyDeleteHow many lives alone did that save?
Heroes hells yeah.
We should use this to recognize that we are the same fragile humans being blown apart by murderers with bombs, the same as those who die every day in chaos and smoke and dust in Pakistan, Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Somalia, Nigeria and so many more. We are so ridiculously safe and protected, a moment like this should allow us to recognize the exposure and fragility of women gathering firewood in South Sudan, villagers hearing the endless buzz of unmanned bombers in the sky above Warziristan, families trying to survive the shelling in Damascus, people in Timbuktu caught between French soldiers and foreign jihadis. Nobody is safe, and those of us who come to recognize this simple fact of modern existence should feel a kinship with the daily dead...
ReplyDeleteNobody is safe, and those of us who come to recognize this simple fact of modern existence should feel a kinship with the daily dead...
ReplyDeleteWhile obviously nobody can live 100% risk free, how does it help to think "nobody is safe" is a "simple fact of modern existence"? It's not even a modern thing. I mean nobody has ever been "safe."
But how does it help to live your life dwelling on it? Are the folks all over the planet that are dying in both mundane and horrible ways as we speak helped by that? Are you?
Do you not even get out of bed in the morning, since you might trip, fall, crack your head open, and bleed to death right there, cold and alone? But if you stay in bed you might get a bedsore and get infected and die! Oh no!
Do you spend all your time imagining how people are dying right now? How you might be killed any second by a stray meteorite?
What's the point?
To me, personally, I "feel kinship" with the runners and their families in Boston, because I actually run marathons and that could have easily been me and my family there. And I actually had friends in the race.
And, y'know, I'm human.
Yeah, the world is a horrible place and we'll all die. I'll empathize with all of us various victims of life in my own way, thanks.
Wow, OBS, one of us is having a very bad day. Either I wrote that so clumsily that I utterly failed to communicate, or you completely failed to grasp my most basic point.
ReplyDeleteLet me try it again. I'm not talking about fear, or dwelling on the world as an unsafe place, I am disgusted by Americans, so incredibly SAFE and pampered and protected from such horrors that a an event so tiny and ultimately insignificant would be considered a VERY GOOD DAY in other parts of the world. THEY are the ones who are dwelling, considering a small IED attack a national tragedy. If Boston is a national tragedy, what was Mumbai, or Karachi, or Warziristan.
Americans should look at the world and rejoice that THIS is the threat we face - this, and living long enough to die from overeating. When most people in the world face incredible real-world threats of violence, disease and starvation, I find the self-absorption required to determine that WE are the victims facing daunting daily risks to be both laughable and foul...
When most people in the world face incredible real-world threats of violence, disease and starvation, I find the self-absorption required to determine that WE are the victims facing daunting daily risks to be both laughable and foul...
ReplyDeleteI got something very different from your "nobody's safe" concluding sentence earlier.
Maybe I've just been reading too many "fuck it, both parties are the same, oogabooga terrah, we're all doomed anyway, why bother" kinds of comments.
Maybe I've just been reading too many "fuck it, both parties are the same, oogabooga terrah, we're all doomed anyway, why bother" kinds of comments.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the problem is you want to believe in the Tooth Fairy.
~
Maybe the problem is you want to believe in the Tooth Fairy.
ReplyDeleteNo, I'm fairly certain I'm not the one living in a fantasy world.
Everything is awful and it'll never get better and we're all doomed. Yay us!
Happy?
Yeah, the world is a horrible place and we'll all die. I'll empathize with all of us various victims of life in my own way, thanks.
ReplyDeleteYour empathy must be a very limited resource, since you feel the need to triage it in such a limited fashion, only offering it to those you deem to deserve it.