Boston Marathon Bombing Reaction: We Need to Be One Nation Again

Impact

One of the suspected Boston bombers has been caught, his brother in arms is dead, and all around the country the hushed anticipation for a successful capture is breathing out in ambulatory celebration on main street and social media — appreciation for first-responders and other unnamed heroes of the atrocious events that transpired on and after Marathon Monday are being heralded as the class of the nation.

It is less a date but an event; Marathon Monday in Boston, has been as perennial as spring flowers in bloom. After a cold winter, every year Bostonians color the streets, in a show of honest grit, strength and determination. All around the nation that strength is observed by our best and brightest that have gone through Boston—taken a wealth of knowledge and experience, owing their tender growth and observation to the Beantown; where so many of us go to become strong honest men and woman.  We give a bit but we take a lot and I’d ask that we don’t forget it — where we came from and what (we've) learned in Boston, is the crucible for our hopes and dreams of a brighter tomorrow… 

How can you not feel compelled to do something? You, of your own, should stand for something. Keep a level head and do well by your neighbor. Show me another nation that shares in our honesty and I want that ally. There is no moral equivocation to what we know about being Americans today — we may shutter in disbelief but so does a Lion before it eats a Zebra.  It’s not too much to say — I don’t think so — things have been tragic, this year, more often now, our heroes are your family member’s. That IS too much to say. 

I want to help

We see Boston and we feel compelled to be stronger, we remember Sandy Hook, we think we’re carrying too much — guilt and the wrong information (this is not nature, not at this point in time, I refuse to believe it) — we can recite lines to Dark Night but we can’t recite all the names of the Aurora victims — and we do sincerely care. 

We are not doing enough.

We were glad when former Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz) started doing better, thankful to God, but we are too far removed from this to be one country, where there was a shooting in Arizona and some of us today might suspect Jared Loughner was the victim and not the killer. 

At this point in time if you are not a concerned citizen, here in America, then you are wasting your place. In the cathartic state of things: it’s not enough to be interested; we all need to be better towards one another. 

We need to be one nation again.  We are blessed to live here, where there is so much freedom; and in that freedom — irony is most evident when people simply don’t have enough to do. In America you can do well by anyone or anything, if you have the time, you can be diplomatic, you can communicate your opinion and you don’t have to kill anyone for it.

What kind of ignorance does it take for the selfish man to believe himself better than the rest, more right than the rest, that they could compound their terror into an activated thing with the intention of harming innocent children? That’s when it’s enough. The selfishness that exists in this world astounds me. Here, in America we have freedom to speak our minds, and you floundered it? You slag, “you losers,” you gave up on life, and that’s something we will not do.

America will not stand for it.

It’s too easy for some of us to remove ourselves from this. Three people killed, hundreds injured. To say “its just nature” is weak — it’s confused, it’s contrived, it’s complacent, and it shows a privileged-thankless human being, half afloat on a boat in Watertown

Last night was the spookiest night of my life — driving around my hometown, with the fog lights on afraid to miss a beat on the a.m. I sprinted door to door and caught CBS News, the coverage that looked like a Gothic manhunt, with a pantheon of police, investigators and official’s backs looking through swamp-green drapery of the night’s cameras on a house at the end of Franklin Street. All at once, in my mind I’m taken from that Frankensteinian image back to Monday and the raw image of the explosions — and in that, juxtaposition of the beginning and the end of a week April was when I began to remember every other beautiful Marathon Mondays and I want them back.

Marathon Monday is not a date in history but a series of events in a cities history and the history of our country, that like all other countries is plagued with random act’s of terror — it’s a tradition, but not our own. 

We protect the tradition of freedom, since we became Americans and since we became patriots, we protect that tradition, for others but most of all for U.S.