Today, a little before 4 pm, a bomb went off around the finish line of the Boston Marathon. It's been all over the internet and the news, so there really is no reason for me to actually go into details about that. I do want to talk about my reaction to not just the event itself, but to other people's reactions, and how my reactions kept changing over the course of just six hours.
I heard (saw actually) the news when I was scrolling through Twitter after waking up from a nap. Strangely enough, it seems that I fell asleep just as the news was hitting Twitter. There was a lot of confusion and people jumping to conclusions, which did not help the situation at all. But more importantly, there were a lot of tweets of people sending their thoughts and prayer to the people of Boston and countless retweets of the numbers for people to locate loved ones or to contact the authorities about any information they may have. It was nice to see that there was good being spread via the internet when there was so much misinformation floating around. In fact, there was a report later on during the day saying how sharing that information helped many people get in touch or track down their love ones in the area, since cell service was either overloaded or cut off at certain points.
Which, by the way, the cell service was cut off because the police were concerned people were detonating bombs over their cell phones. When I read that, it made me so angry that my face hurt. People are desperately trying to get in contact with their loved ones and they can't, because there are horrible people in the world who take a piece of technology that is meant to help people stay in touch and give them peace of mind and then use it for evil. But then I saw that people and local cafes were opening their WiFi up to strangers, so that they could get in contact with their loved ones causing me to have some of my faith restored in humanity.
As you can see, my feelings kept going up and down throughout the day seeing the information as it came in. And this is with not watching the news throughout all of this. I learned a long time ago to completely ignore the 24 hour news cable channels during something like this, because I feel that all they do is perpetuate panic and do not (more so than usual) differentiate with their opinions and what the facts of the situation are. Then again, I am on the internet following what is happening, which can be even worse.
Even with the stories of runners of the marathon runners running straight from the race to the hospital to give blood and the countless people who ran towards the explosion to help, it was all still too sad to think about. Running a marathon is one of those great human accomplishments and it was the Boston marathon, meaning these people had probably trained for years to get their time down so they could qualify to run in it. This should have been one of the best days of their lives and instead it was a terrible day, and for some it may have been one of the worst days. The fact that there are runners who lost one of their legs was just too much for me.
Then there was the perspective of this whole thing. So many people were concerned about friends and family when they heard about the bombing, including a friend of mine on Twitter who mentioned how she can't believe how there are people in the world that live with that feeling every day. There is chaos in their countries and they never know when it is safe to go about their lives because some horrible person may set off a bomb. Or they may live in a bad neighborhood and that every time they hear a distant gunshot, they worry it may have been a loved one.
I am so fortunate and so happy that I do not have feeling on a regular basis, or ever really. I know that I should not have this feeling of a loss of faith in humanity because this sort of thing brings into perspective how horrible this sort of this is and unfortunately, how frequent something like this happens. I know there are more good people in the world than there are bad, but it's hard to believe that when I think about the world. I hope that the people of Boston, and people all over the country and the world that experience this sort of thing all the time, will heal in time and that humanity as a whole continues to grow stronger until this sort of thing is something that is only discussed in the history books.
No comments:
Post a Comment