What were you doing when you first heard of it? You might have been driving. You might have passed the newsboy at the street corner if only you did not see the headline. The effect was of course dumbfounding. Three dead. Scores wounded. And the event was the Boston Marathon?
And of course you rushed home or to your office, anywhere you could find CNN or Fox News or BBC, or Al Jazeera, or any one of the international news networks. You realize you will be following this report in the days perhaps even weeks ahead. Here was news that overshadowed Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. And without even realizing it you have become once again an active part of the international community. You have become at least one unit in scores of statistics that would describe what channels the world tunes in to, what news it finds important enough to follow, what for it is real.
How can you help yourself? The innocent had gone out to watch a traditional yearly event. They were out to have fun on a holiday. Here was an event that had always been news just simply by being there. Does anyone ever remember who wins? For most, joining the Boston Marathon or just even watching it is something akin to a pilgrimage. That it happens always every year without fail and always around this time is the whole point of it. It is a human institution. Which is metaphor to edifice, infrastructure or even a pair of very tall buildings.
Which is precisely the reason why a person or groups of persons mad or crazy enough would want to bomb it. As if to say, you cannot make anything big enough or so impregnable we cannot destroy it or at least inflict enough casualties to make it hurt. And it is hard for you to imagine there are people who are actually like that. How ever did history make them suffer so that they have grown capable of such acts?
Count yourself fortunate for being more blessed than them. You, who like everyone else silently bears the burden of your own life, who bears disappointments. You have known suffering and loss. You have bourn injustice both personal and institutional. Yet even so, you have not become so despondent that you would put a bomb in a crowded place in order to attract people to your cause.
If you had an army of enemies before you, you might take up a gun or throw rocks to fight them, even risking death. Which only proves you have not become so despondent you would do this thing so entirely without honor. But perhaps that is only your own good fortune. Is there an excuse to do what they did? If there is, could you contain it in your head?
What can anyone still say about these acts of killing the innocent to pursue a political cause? Where are these people coming from? What world do they inhabit? And how do they the enter the U.S. so easily where it is almost impossible for you to go there even if all you are looking for is work?
But the act does succeed to the extent that the world is terrorized. After all, how do you defend yourself from people like these, who would put a bomb in the middle of a crowd to kill and maim the innocent. And all this on some ordinary day marked only by a traditional athletic event. Everyone was supposed to be just having fun.
Who would have thought? And all that death and damage was supposed to be over Chechnya? Whatever is happening in Chechnya? Where the hell is it? What do you care? And why shouldn’t you care even less now?