I was up early, 5:30 a.m., logged on to the Web the day bombs exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon and in the city’s John F. Kennedy library. Soon after reading news blurbs about the violence I checked by e-mail on one of my best friends, a physician from India who lived two blocks from the finish line. He said in reply that he was planning to go there but changed his mind when he heard an explosion.
I felt relieved to know he was safe, but I could not dare watch any video of the tragedy posted on Facebook and news websites. In the afternoon one of my senior colleagues at the University of the Philippines Cebu read out loud that dozens of victims had lost their limbs. Through another Web update I learned that the bombings snuffed out at least three lives. Scores remained in critical condition in hospitals.
The bombings were doubly terrible because they happened in settings that epitomize peace: First, the terminal line of a race that in drawing participants from around the globe has become a stage for demonstrating human solidarity; second, a repository of books, a center for dispelling ignorance and intolerance and thereby for exposing the ill logic of violence.
At least two elements made the explosions newsworthy. On one hand, still poorly defined due to nagging questions about who were the perpetrators, there was the element of conflict.
On the other hand, more pronounced, was the element of oddity. It was strange for running or reading to end up as carnage. One does not pull a Charles Dickens title off a library shelf or accelerate to a final hundred-meter dash only to hear blasts afterward.
But are not wars and terror perpetual oddities? I ask because many of us have become so accustomed to belligerence that reports about it seem normal.
The Web may not offer the most complete picture of the human condition but it does chronicle how we, at least the netizens among us, many of whom were stoic in the face of reports of Middle Eastern upheavals, rushed to mourn victims and commiserate with survivors in the wake of a situation that appeared abnormal also because it happened in the city of Boston.
Appeals to pray for Boston are timely, appropriate and noble but our thoughts and prayers can rise to their full power only if they embrace more than just the people there. We cannot become so jaded as to dismiss the pre-election violence that claimed at least 61 Iraqi lives on the day of the Boston bombings and at least 16 Syrian nationals a day before that just because these things happened in Iraq and Syria. We must resist the numbness that deludes us into carrying on as if in stride the feuds that bog down Mindanao just because that Filipino land of promise has been labeled a land of frequent tumult. These lands and their peoples need our attention and intercession, too.
The Boston blasts impel us anew to reconfigure our cognitive and affective maps of war and peace. Our minds and hearts—with no mean help from the mass media—tend to divide the world into serene and troubled spots. But the terror in Boston is the terror in the Middle East and the violence in the Far East showing off their disrespect for geographical boundaries.
We are bound to weep and wail for more and more cities of peace the less we shed tears, the more we despair for certain places and cross them out as lands of war. Genuine peace does not flourish in ghettos. Terror will eat up every pocket of peace on earth unless we who hope for peace first work for it where it seems hard to reap, starting from our own damaged interpersonal relationships.
All of us have a burden to keep the peace in our homes, friendships and workplaces, where we are always abreast of what is new. We are all a bunch of phonies if we can afford to lament, online and offline, every other instance of discord in the world except the word wars we wage against and the cold shoulder treatments we inflict on our neighbors.