It's Tuesday morning and I am just learning about the Boston Marathon bombings. Normally world events don't stick with me emotionally, but I can't seem to get past this one today.
And the bombers waited until the most people were finishing, wandering around happy and sweaty and disoriented after the race, cheered on by their families and onlookers while reporters captured everything on film... There was no government or military operation there, no materialistic
Western culture being exported, no corporate greed. It was a marathon.
Things like this happen in other places. Over the weekend, 8 people died when a bomb exploded on a bus in Pakistan. It was an act of terrorism. I feel a little guilty for not being so concerned about that incident when this one has me down. After all, the Pakistani victims were mostly women and children going somewhere on a bus.
But things like this never happened in the U.S. until just over a decade ago, and they have never happened at such a pure sort of a place as the finish line of a marathon, run every year on Patriots' Day. The bombs exploded right behind a row of flags from countries all over the world.
As an American in Europe I don't know whether this news is taken differently here. Are Europeans also shaken up by the bombing? Or do they see it as just another incident of violence in the U.S.? I will talk to some about it, but not today.
Today I will just be a little more quiet, a little more serious, a little more sorry about what happened. I will wonder if there is a way we could ever be really safe at a public event, or if at some point we stop worrying because there's no way to be totally secure.
And to think that yesterday I was worried about my bike tire.
I promise you more light-hearted posts in the near future. Until then, I will think about those runners who laced up their shoes yesterday, for the last time.
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About Me
- Julia
- Thanks for coming to my blog. It started as a way to keep in touch with family and friends, and now has become an ongoing project. I'm an American living in Germany and trying to travel whenever I can. I write about my experiences as an expatriate (the interesting ones and the embarrassing ones), and about my travels. There are some recurring characters in this blog, particularly my husband Brian and several of our friends. The title comes from the idea that living in a foreign country means making a lot of mistakes. So the things you used to do easily you now have to try over and over again. Hopefully, like me, you can laugh at how idiotic it feels. If you have happened upon my blog, then welcome. Knowing that people are reading what I write makes me keep going. Feel free to write comments or suggestions for future posts.
It is hard to over-estimate how intrinsic Patriots Day and the Marathon are to Boston's identity. (Tax day less so.) This tragedy was doubly shocking by attacking the innocent families and bystanders at such a glorious event. It seems everyone knows someone who is running and everyone has gone to see the marathon some year or another. I know two colleagues who know people who lost legs. It is so close that it seems like it is personal for everyone. It's nowhere near the scale of 9/11, and it's not Newtown (tho they were there running), but the impact on Boston's psyche in kind of parallel.
ReplyDeleteWhat is happening to our society when individuals believe it is okay to wreak this kind of senseless violence on innocent people?
Ed
A perfect Marathon day, then the unimaginable (Part 1)
ReplyDeleteBy Kevin Cullen | Globe Columnist
April 16, 2013
It was as good a Patriots Day, as good a Marathon day, as any, dry and seasonably warm but not hot like last year. The buzz was great. While the runners climbed Heartbreak Hill, the Red Sox were locked in another white-knuckle duel with the Tampa Bay Rays at Fenway Park. The only thing missing was Lou Reed crooning “Perfect Day” in the background.
The winners and the elite runners had long ago finished, when in the Fens, at shortly after 2 p.m., Mike Napoli kissed a ball off The Green Monster in the bottom of the ninth, allowing Dustin Pedroia to scamper all the way home from first base, giving the Red Sox a walk-off win.
Many of those jubilant Sox fans had walked down through Kenmore Square toward the Back Bay to watch the Marathon. Some of them had just got to the finish line when the first bomb went off, shortly before 3 p.m.
In an instant, a perfect day had morphed into something viscerally evil.
The location and timing of the bombs was sinister beyond belief, done purposely to maximize death and destruction. Among those who watched in horror as a fireball belched out across the sidewalk on Boylston were the parents of the schoolkids murdered in Newtown, Conn. The Atlantic reported they were sitting in a VIP section at the finish line, across the street from the explosion.
Before 3 p.m., the medical tent had seen nothing worse than a blister. Then, in an instant, it was transformed into a triage unit.
This is how bad this is. I went out Monday night and bumped into some firefighters I know. They said one of the dead was an 8-year-old boy from Dorchester who had gone out to hug his dad after he crossed the finish line. The dad walked on; the boy went back to the sidewalk to join his mom and his little sister. And then the bomb went off. The boy was killed. His sister’s leg was blown off. His mother was badly injured. That’s just one family, one story.
It would be wrong and a cliche to say we lost our innocence on Monday afternoon as a plume of white smoke drifted high above Boylston Street, as blood pooled on the sidewalk across from the Boston Public Library, as severed limbs lay amid the bruised and the bloodied and the stunned, their ears ringing, their ears bleeding.
We lost our innocence on another perfect day, in September, 12 years ago. But we lost something Monday, too, and that is the idea that we will ever feel totally safe in this city again.
The Marathon is the city’s signature event, a tangible link with the rest of the world. It is one of the few things that allows us to cling to that pretense of Boston being the Hub of the universe. Patriots Day is a celebration of our revolutionary history, but we share it with the world. It is the one day of the year when the city is its most diverse, with people from so many other countries here to run those 26 miles from Hopkinton to the Back Bay.
And so it was alternately poignant and horrifying to watch as first responders frantically pulled metal barriers and the flags of so many different countries down into Boylston Street in a desperate rush to get to the dead and the injured on the sidewalk.
Those flags looked like victims, splayed on Boylston Street as the acrid smoke hung in the air.
(to be continued)
A perfect Marathon day (Part 2)
ReplyDeleteBy Kevin Cullen | Globe Columnist
April 16, 2013
(continuation)
After the initial explosion, runners instinctively craned their necks toward the blast site. Then, 12 seconds later, a second explosion, further up Boylston. It was pandemonium. I saw an older runner wearing high rise pink socks, about to cross the finish line. He was knocked to the ground by a photographer running up Boylston Street toward the second explosion.
In an instant, so many lives changed. Some ended. The telephone lines burned. Everybody was trying to figure out who and why. The cops I talked to were shaking their heads. It could be anybody. Could be foreign. Could be domestic. Could be Al Qaeda. Could be home-grown nuts.
It was Patriots Day. It was tax day. It was Israel’s independence day. Theories swirled like the smoke above Boylston Street. Friday marks the 20th anniversary of the FBI assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, and the 18th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing.
Then there was the story about the young Saudi guy who was being questioned by the FBI. Now, the FBI wouldn’t tell me if my pants were on fire, but my old pal John Miller from CBS News reported that the kid did a runner after the explosion and that somebody tackled him and held him for the police. Miller used to be an associate director at the FBI, and let’s just say his sources there are impeccable. Miller says the Saudi guy was cooperative and denied he had anything to do with the bombing. He says he took off because, like everybody else in the Back Bay, he was terrified. A law enforcement source later told me that Miller’s story is right on the money.
I saw Lisa Hughes from WBZ-TV trying to do her job, amid the blood and the body parts. And then I remembered that Lisa, who is as nice a person as you’ll find in this business, married a guy from Wellesley named Mike Casey who lost his wife Neilie on one of the planes out of Boston that crashed into the Twin Towers. And then I tried not to cry and just marveled at how professional Lisa was.
Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick began his day by visiting ailing Mayor Tom Menino of Boston in the hospital. Hours later, Patrick was on the phone with President Obama, and Menino signed himself out of the hospital. He couldn’t be cooped up while his city was being attacked. Like so many people in the Back Bay, the mayor needed a wheelchair to get around.
Dave McGillivray, the Marathon director, had just arrived in Hopkinton, and was about to run the 26-mile route, as he does every year hours after the last runner has departed. A state cop told McGillivray what had happened and McGillivray jumped in a cruiser and raced back to the finish line.
Before 3 p.m., the medical tent at the finish line had seen nothing worse than a blister. Then, in an instant, it was transformed into a battlefield triage unit. Doctors and nurses who had been running the race in turn raced to the medical tent and volunteered their services, still sweating, still wearing their running gear. People in the Back Bay opened their homes to rnners who couldn’t get back to their hotels.
We will get through this, but we will never be the same. Even as the smoke drifted away from Boylston, we are still in the fog, still in the dark, our ears still ringing from the bombs. And we are left with this unnerving proposition: If it was home-grown, it was probably an aberration, the work of a lunatic. If it was foreign inspired or sponsored, we will never feel safe again in our own town.
President Obama asked the rest of the country to pray for Boston. But we need more than prayers. We need answers. We need peace of mind, and we’ll never have that again on Patriots Day. Ever. Because somebody came here on our Patriots Day and launched their own revolution.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeCullen.