Pushing Thirtyy & Beyond…

I had been experiencing some serious highs and lows this past week, really trying to make sense of everything happening in my personal life.  When I came across the news of the explosions in Boston, everything somehow came to a halt.  It’s not that it didn’t or doesn’t matter — it’s that something bigger than myself was happening and directly affecting those that I loved.

I immediately texted my best friend, who lives in Boston and together we watched the day unfold virtually.  I was able to get in contact with my close friends that live in the area.  I watched my best friend, my closest friends, go through what I had gone through on 9/11.  That feeling of fear, chaos, confusion, anxiety, not being able to reach loved ones, not knowing if they would be okay.

I couldn’t turn to the politicization that tends to happen with tragedies these days.  I was frozen in the thought that I could have lost some of my closest friends in an instant.  To a New Yorker, Boston is a small town, and from what I have seen in my 12 years regularly visiting the city, this seems to be true.  Boston is a community where everyone seems to know everyone.  I knew that I would have friends at the marathon either watching or running. I knew I had friends working in the hospitals, or in companies near the finish line.  I knew when they announced that a 29 year old was among the casualties that one of my friends would somehow be connected to her.  This tragedy really hit home for me.

It was almost 4 months to the day since Sandy Hook, so the wounds are still fresh for the nation.  And I realized with this tragedy that I never allowed myself to fully feel the pain of that tragedy.  It didn’t have to hit so close to home to hurt so bad.  I feel like though I still mourn that tragedy, that it was a singular evil act with no answers, but at least we knew who was to blame pretty quickly.  As the day went on, I wanted to hear that they had a suspect connected to the Boston Marathon tragedy, because we are a culture that expects fast turnaround, and I feared that we may not know who did this to a town I love so much, and I hated seeing my friends suffer and afraid for their safety.

And I worry for this country that these tragedies are happening all too frequently these days, and with social media we all react emotionally before we really know what’s going on.  We don’t give ourselves a chance to think before we talk, to let things sink in.  We are insensitive and move beyond the human tragedy to the politics and blaming the media too quickly.  But we are all reporters now.  We can’t blame the media anymore.  And at the end of the day, it was the smart usage of media and social media, providing the information we needed without providing the suspect with too much information, that brought these killers to their knees.

So this chapter may seem to be over, but there is always another evil plan being hatched, it seems.  Tragedies somehow divide and unite us all at once, and in my opinion, no law is going to stop the presence of evil.  There is always a way.  But I do think that people who are not loners, when people find a connection with others, the natural compassion can keep us from the darkness.  If we reconnect with humanity and take more time to understand each other rather than attacking each other perhaps we can heal this country.