Boston Marathon bombing
Rough #5
Written: 2013-04-16
Published: 2021-05-25
From my journal: 16 April 2013 (Tuesday) (the day after)
[Note: my trigger for looking this up and posting it now was the tragedy at the Yellow River Stone Forest 100km trail race in China last Saturday. While they are only very loosely related, my gut reaction to both incidents was the same, and I needed to read this entry from back then.]
This particular disaster, really just another in a long line of them past and to come, felt like a personal attack. It broke me down a couple times in the first half hour as I watched it on TV and thought about it. I’ve never run Boston, but it’s there in my mind as a special event, a validating exercise and a symbol of something very noble, something that showcases the very best of humanity. This violence that has happened there is not fundamentally different from the violence that happens daily around the world, but it feels more profane at an event like this. It’s not an attack on daily life, it’s an attack on elevated life, not on people going about their daily thing, but on people at the peak of a whole mind/body effort. I’m not saying this is worse than any of the other massacres that I’m certain happened yesterday, but I do know that it feels personal and profane to me in a way that not even 9/11 felt.
I don’t know what to do with that feeling, though.
I haven’t gotten to the point that I’ve heard other commentators talk about, the point of anger. I can feel sadness, I can feel despair at human nature, but anger isn’t coming to me, at least not yet. It seems that to be angry about this is the same as being angry at the windy rain I’m looking out at, or the long winter, or the bit of soreness in my leg from a run over the weekend. Human violence is just another force of nature, an undeniable force that eventually makes itself felt everywhere, just as “bad” weather does.
So what does a runner do?
We do what we do against every force of nature — we get up and keep going. We do exactly what the runner in orange did, the old man who was passing directly in front of the first blast, the one who stumbled to the ground under the force of that blast. It’s exactly the thing we do when we misstep on the trail and stumble and fall. We take a breath, realize that we’re still alive, realize that we can stand back up. And then we stagger forward again, as that man did, towards the finish line. Not in anger, probably with defiance, but mainly because we know that we really have no choice.
It is not about fighting back against the people who did this, just as it’s not about fighting the mountain or the trail or the cold. Nature in all its glory and peacefulness and violence is there, and our real fight is not with it, but with ourselves.
We cannot, will not change the steepness of the trail or the chilling power of the wind or the violent urges and actions of our fellow man. But we can fight the good fight within ourselves, and I guess that’s the only fight that really counts.