Boston Marathon Bombings: shaking my faith in humanity

As a current half-marathon-er in training, and prospective future marathon-er, I was avidly staring at twitter on Monday and being overwhelmed at the split times for the elite runners. All very impressive, very inspiring, I wondered if these were people or ultra speedy aliens. I digress.

And then someone blew up the finish line. They killed an eight year old boy, and took off his sister’s leg. For, as far as I can tell, absolutely no reason other than mindless killing. And, after thinking about little else for the last two days, I just can’t fathom why someone would do that. Part of it is definitely a ‘almost-runner-to-runner’ connection: the amount of work that goes in to being an elite runner is something that I can’t comprehend – and I’m out pounding the pavements every day. But most of it is the senseless taking of human life. Why?

Runners who have trained their entire lives to qualify to run the Boston Marathon – who now don’t have any legs. These weren’t divisive or political figures. They didn’t represent western capitalism or religious fundamentalism. They weren’t even the best performers on the day. And they will never run again. Ever. And there is someone, out there, who did that to them.

© Boston Globe

Well, humanity, frankly – you suck. I was on the other side of the world, and I’m not the most emotional of beings. Yet, today, when my partner and friends went to watch the funeral procession of Lady Thatcher, I was genuinely worried that they were going to come home hurt – or not at all. I didn’t trust that the police could protect them: because if there are people who are prepared to do the truly unimaginable how do we anticipate it?

Now I’m not going to go camp out in a bunker and hide from all the nutters out there, but I will say this: some news cannot afford to be ‘tomorrow’s chip paper’. Some news is meant to define a generation. Some news requires us to stand up and say: we are not afraid of you. We will keep going, we will band together, we will find you and you will be held accountable.