Grace Ross: Marathon Explosions
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Tears in my heart: tears for those who are hurt, tears for those who are scared.
Then, incredible – almost incredulous – tears of thanks for the First Responders! Even as the reporters were showing the initial footage and trying to make sense of it themselves, they could not miss the First Responders who rushed towards the bombing! As the reporters said: a bomb goes off and a second bomb goes off. Clearly there might be other bombs nearby. And yet, the First Responders went toward the injured... faster than any of the media correspondents could believe; that’s how fast they got there.
As the story and tales of these explosions at the Boston Marathon become processed over the next few days and we hear who did it and how they did it and perhaps why they thought they did it, we’ll have a lot more information.
The first response from all of us whether we know it or not is shock at some level.
And I am always struck particularly by the contrast these days. Where so much of the elected officials, the political life of our country is dominated by politics of hate, of us versus them and of difference, yet when you get onto the ground level where most of us live: there’s a huge percentage of folks who’ve always been driven and will always be driven by love and caring for each other.
Those first responders weren’t running to someone they knew. They were running to strangers. That was their first impulse before they even thought.
Then there are the first stories of folks talking about helpers just showing up while they were dealing with this horror of the explosion that just happened to them or a family member; the First Responders arrived with tourniquets and took care as fast as possible.
The runners rushing up to reveal to police that they were doctors or nurses and please, to let them into the blast area; that they could help. Pictures of my friend Carlos who has lost two sons himself needlessly, covered in blood from having helped those who lost limbs. My friend, Jarrett, who was running and as soon as I got on Facebook, friends were posting to see if he was all right; less than 3 hours later I hear his voice on TV reporting what the Red Cross was looking for as he had already returned to work with them this evening.
The first large outpouring of people after the bombings of 911 on the ground in New York was a huge march with hundreds of thousands of people. The theme was: “our grief is not an excuse for war”.
My reaction after my grief, love, and prayers to those in harm’s way and the First Responders who got there so fast was: these incidents, this level of violence, becomes an opportunity for us to continue the trend of not caring or trusting those who are different from us. Or worse, anger at those who have been targeted by assumptions about who they are and why they do what they do in the world. This incident is likely to be fertile ground for prejudice and destructive anger.
My second sharing then was may this also become a reminder of why we value nonviolence and love for each other so much.
Someone far wiser than me said, “Hate begets hate and only love can beget love”-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
An experience like this also becomes sort of a blank slate, a Rorschach blot, for us to project onto it our assumptions and our fears.
I was pleased by the number of folks in leadership who asked people not to jump to conclusions, not to assume who might have done this. Initial reports quickly came in that the bombs that the police has found unexploded appeared to be homemade not likely to be part of an international terrorist plot. I hope that that put aside some of the kneejerk fears that we’ve all grown accustomed to in the last 11 1/2 years of our lives in the U.S.
Others have pointed out that for some parts of the world, the fear of violence is part of their daily lives including in certain communities in our country. The toll from gun death has gone through the roof in the US and here may be a further expansion of homegrown violence that we take out on each other.
My wishes and dreams are of a time when what dominates is that first responder energy, the tendency to run toward those around us, to those previously strangers to us, who are in need and that we solve these problems as a community coming together.
The First Responders today modeled that with disregard to their own safety understanding that together is how we create safety and how we heal harm. We are lucky in an odd sort of way that Boston has so many hospitals prepared to handle whatever comes at us that everybody was able to be rushed to care and got care on the spot. Apparently even the Red Cross reports that for this crisis they didn’t need blood.
Of course, the blood banks will need to be replenished in the coming days. So, too, will our love and forgiveness for each other need to be replenished in coming days as we come together, I hope, as a state around not only our residents, but the guests amongst us from around the world who came to this emotionally central event for our state.
The Boston Marathon is such a tribute to the human spirit as marathons always are. May our response to this crisis – building on that of our First Responders – also be a tribute to our human spirit.
Grace Ross is a former Gubernatorial candidate and author of Main St. Smarts.
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