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The Boston Marathon
Apr. 16th, 2013 01:15 amRather than doing the many small and hard-to-schedule errands I planned, I spent the day reassuring people who live in other cities that I'm fine, while simultaneously being annoyed with the way news is currently reported by the major networks and radio stations. Neither of these is particularly unusual, because I am friends with a lot of mother hens who worry about whether I am ok even when they have no reason to think I might not be, and spend almost every day listening closely to hours upon hours of news, and noting how much of it is wild speculation, crass emotionality, and irritating filler.
In almost every way that matters, the Boston marathon bombing was no closer to me than the shootings at Aurora or Newtown, 9/11, or the London subway bombings. It was technically closer by, but not closer by in a sense that it's an area I go regularly, or closer in a sense that I lost friends. The full extent of my day's disruption was I lost cell phone service for a while, but my cell phone was out of battery anyway, and Ciro had to catch a different train home. My cousin Scarlett was at her salon more than a mile from the bombing, and will probably receive fewer bookings for a while, but is otherwise unaffected. My sadness over the bombing is the same as anyone else's sadness over the bombing, and is the same thing I would be feeling if I was still in Dallas.
However, this one did make me angry in a way that the others did not make me angry. It's not a "this is my town" sort of thing - if anything, I think Boston is the least harmful possible major city for a bombing. We have a very developed emergency response system, a mostly educated and affluent population that's ready to help and pretty ok with being told to please stay indoors and act calm, and in this case three fully-staffed level one trauma centers within a mile of the blast. Even in the case of a larger blast, our buildings are not very tall and tend to be built sturdy, and our infrastructure has old-school backups like wells and footpaths, and if the city is out of commission for a while, it doesn't really stop the wheels of commerce, travel, or government on a national scale. Academic progress and a lot of R&D get slowed down a bit, but we're not a particularly high-value target.
Instead, this bombing makes me angry because it's sadistic; it strikes me as unambiguously anti-human. Not anti-Boston, or you'd target Fenway. Not anti-US, or you wouldn't target an international event. Not a matter of racking up kills or some other fool bragging right. I am not myself a runner and have no interest in running, and especially not marathons, but you can't watch a runner and not see a human body in a pure expression of its physicality. Moreover, these are people who trained very hard over months and years, most of them for no money and without a chance of winning any race other than their race with themselves. This was a moment of triumph and culmination for hundreds of runners and their families, and each of the runners was running for a different reason. Those individual meanings and stories got taken away, not just in the sense of lives interrupted or potential that wasn't realized, but in complete spite.
It is an act of terror that seems less terrifying (because who is now afraid to run or go out? Nobody, I think) than mutilatory. The mutilation, rather than self-aggrandizement or political speech, seems to have been the point, whether or not the person (or people) who planted the bombs understood their own meaning. Why else strike at the legs of runners, when they have already run so far and so hard that in the legend of Marathon, Phididippides (the runner) collapsed and died from exhaustion when he reached the end? These people did not collapse; instead, they were collapsed. And the many, many more who finished the race but were not at the bombing will not get to celebrate finishing, and the many, many more who were prevented by the bombing from finishing the race will not get to celebrate finishing.
In all other cases of mass killings, I have wanted the perpetrators found in order to prevent further incidents, but haven't had a personal feeling about it beyond a sadness that human brains can go wrong. In this case, I want the person to be found and shot by police before there's any kind of trial, but in some kind of way that's painful before it kills them. Maybe shot in the foot, poetically, and then the hospital is too busy to deal with it until it's too late, and gangrene has set in, and we gradually have to chop off more and more of them but can't give any pain medicine because we don't have the right medical records to know whether it's safe. Something like that.
It probably doesn't help that the running/violence combination makes me think of Gallipoli, as though that (good but sad) movie and that enraging campaign need to be on my mind.
On an unrelated note, I have temporarily made it more difficult to comment anonymously, and even if you have OpenID you may (or may not) be subject to capcha tests for the time being. I know this is annoying, and I'm sorry; hopefully it won't last long. I've been getting some annoying spam and don't have the ability to block an IP address, and I'm hoping this will make that person (or bot) go away.
In almost every way that matters, the Boston marathon bombing was no closer to me than the shootings at Aurora or Newtown, 9/11, or the London subway bombings. It was technically closer by, but not closer by in a sense that it's an area I go regularly, or closer in a sense that I lost friends. The full extent of my day's disruption was I lost cell phone service for a while, but my cell phone was out of battery anyway, and Ciro had to catch a different train home. My cousin Scarlett was at her salon more than a mile from the bombing, and will probably receive fewer bookings for a while, but is otherwise unaffected. My sadness over the bombing is the same as anyone else's sadness over the bombing, and is the same thing I would be feeling if I was still in Dallas.
However, this one did make me angry in a way that the others did not make me angry. It's not a "this is my town" sort of thing - if anything, I think Boston is the least harmful possible major city for a bombing. We have a very developed emergency response system, a mostly educated and affluent population that's ready to help and pretty ok with being told to please stay indoors and act calm, and in this case three fully-staffed level one trauma centers within a mile of the blast. Even in the case of a larger blast, our buildings are not very tall and tend to be built sturdy, and our infrastructure has old-school backups like wells and footpaths, and if the city is out of commission for a while, it doesn't really stop the wheels of commerce, travel, or government on a national scale. Academic progress and a lot of R&D get slowed down a bit, but we're not a particularly high-value target.
Instead, this bombing makes me angry because it's sadistic; it strikes me as unambiguously anti-human. Not anti-Boston, or you'd target Fenway. Not anti-US, or you wouldn't target an international event. Not a matter of racking up kills or some other fool bragging right. I am not myself a runner and have no interest in running, and especially not marathons, but you can't watch a runner and not see a human body in a pure expression of its physicality. Moreover, these are people who trained very hard over months and years, most of them for no money and without a chance of winning any race other than their race with themselves. This was a moment of triumph and culmination for hundreds of runners and their families, and each of the runners was running for a different reason. Those individual meanings and stories got taken away, not just in the sense of lives interrupted or potential that wasn't realized, but in complete spite.
It is an act of terror that seems less terrifying (because who is now afraid to run or go out? Nobody, I think) than mutilatory. The mutilation, rather than self-aggrandizement or political speech, seems to have been the point, whether or not the person (or people) who planted the bombs understood their own meaning. Why else strike at the legs of runners, when they have already run so far and so hard that in the legend of Marathon, Phididippides (the runner) collapsed and died from exhaustion when he reached the end? These people did not collapse; instead, they were collapsed. And the many, many more who finished the race but were not at the bombing will not get to celebrate finishing, and the many, many more who were prevented by the bombing from finishing the race will not get to celebrate finishing.
In all other cases of mass killings, I have wanted the perpetrators found in order to prevent further incidents, but haven't had a personal feeling about it beyond a sadness that human brains can go wrong. In this case, I want the person to be found and shot by police before there's any kind of trial, but in some kind of way that's painful before it kills them. Maybe shot in the foot, poetically, and then the hospital is too busy to deal with it until it's too late, and gangrene has set in, and we gradually have to chop off more and more of them but can't give any pain medicine because we don't have the right medical records to know whether it's safe. Something like that.
It probably doesn't help that the running/violence combination makes me think of Gallipoli, as though that (good but sad) movie and that enraging campaign need to be on my mind.
On an unrelated note, I have temporarily made it more difficult to comment anonymously, and even if you have OpenID you may (or may not) be subject to capcha tests for the time being. I know this is annoying, and I'm sorry; hopefully it won't last long. I've been getting some annoying spam and don't have the ability to block an IP address, and I'm hoping this will make that person (or bot) go away.
