I’m numb. It’s happened again. Too many times during this lifetime for me, but that’s just an aspect of humanity. I think it is important to try to notice not the evil act that happened, but the heroic reaction of those who rushed in to help the injured and get the situation under control despite their own personal risk. That is what humanity is about, not about the occasional broken person who does terrible things. Those are the people we need to all strive to rise above and not let them conquer us.
One person in my twitter feed today noted that while it’s tragic we lost some lives to this today that we also lost about 100 lives to auto accidents, and will lose another 100 tomorrow, and again the day after, and the day after. We also have to remember the great cost of cancer. This isn’t to trivialize the deaths that happened in this event but to remind all of us that humans have a strong tendency to over-react to rare but dramatic situations and ignore the larger and more severe but chronic ones.
We need to keep events like this in view within the larger perspective. They want to cause us pain and convince us to crawl into a bunker and hide. If we do, they win. the reality is that you’re no less safe tomorrow in downtown boston than you were yesterday — and much more likely to get run over by a car than ever be in the same timezone as an attack like this.
Which is no solace to those that lost people today. I’m in all honesty numb; I watched the coverage like many of us, thinking “not again”. But yes, again. And the thing that kept wandering through my head today was how glad I was to have made a decision not to bring kids into this world, given the future we seem to have created for them to live in.
Tomorrow begins yet another attempt to return to normalcy for all of us, moving past this and forward in our lives.
Whatever normal is.
To everyone who was affected by this today, I’m so sorry. And as a species, once again so disappointed in ourselves.