It's a sick and cruel world: Is there anyone you can trust?
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Those were the words of an eyewitness to the two, almost simultaneous, bomb blasts this Monday at the Boston Marathon. Standing beside him, wiping away tears, was a woman runner who said some body parts were splashed onto her face after the bombs went off
President Obama correctly warned against any hasty conclusion as to who the perpetrator(s) might be. He grimly promised that if and when they are found and, presumably, proven guilty, they would be made to feel the “full weight of justice”.
At the time of writing, no individual or group has come out to claim responsibility. And perhaps nobody will. What kind of a sick mind committed this hideous crime? Patton Oswalt, an American comedian and writer, gave them names – “human insect” and “a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths”. If one looks at the gruesome photographs of the explosion scenes, one may come up with even worse descriptions.
An eight-year-old boy who was among the spectators near the finish line waiting for his father to complete the gruelling 26.2-mile (42.195-kilometre) race was killed instantly. His six-year-old sister lost one of her legs. Their mother suffered grievous injuries to her brain. The status of their father was unknown. And this is just one family, not to mention hundreds of those maimed and injured. The explosive devices were said to be pressure cookers packed with nails, pellets and ball bearings, to amplify the damage of the explosion. The bombs were meant to kill and maim as much as possible.
Why?
Philosophers like to say that once we start asking the question “why”, our life and our world will never be the same.
But, we are not sure what “the same” entails. Sensible and meaningful? Harmonious and congenial? Just and empathetic?
Certainly, we find plenty of evidence that it’s none of the above.
But, even as hardened as some have us have become, the attack in Boston is devastating for many reasons.
The Boston Marathon is an iconic annual event in America and the world’s oldest city marathon. In 1897, when it was first held, there were 18 runners competing. Last year, there were 35,000. It is a race that runners have to qualify for. Some people train for years to make the cut. The course of the race can be humbling, even for the boldest and best runners. It’s long and uneven. It goes downhill, and then up, just when the competitors are about to run out of steam. It runs through Bostonians’ beloved Fenway Park – home of the proud Red Sox baseball team, six times World Series champions – and ends in the downtown area, where families and friends of the runners await their arrival at the finish line with a sense of pride, even for those who come in at the tail end, down to the very last straggler. The atmosphere at the finish line is celebratory.
More symbolic to Americans is the fact that the Boston Marathon takes place on Massachusetts’ Patriot’s Day – the day that commemorates the opening battles of the American Revolutionary War.
One can say with abundant justification that the Boston Marathon is a reflection of the triumphant spirit of America and the indefatigable determination of man. It has been about inspiration and a sense of purpose, of hopes and dreams, of personal pain and joy.
It is said that modern America lost its innocence the day President John F Kennedy was assassinated, on November 22, 1963. We can add that it lost its sense of virtue on the day the Waco massacre took place, on April 19, 1993, when the FBI stormed a compound belonging to a religious cult, killing 76 people including women and children. It lost its sense of insular security on April 19, 1995, when a handful of its own people bombed a federal office building in Oklahoma, killing 169 people and injuring 680. The perpetrators stated that the bombing was in retaliation for two assault incidents by the FBI in 1992 (at Ruby Ridge) and the Waco mass murder. They never expressed remorse that innocent people were killed. To this day, they remain, in their own warped minds, truly heroic Americans.
America lost its sense of invincibility on the day the twin towers of the World Trade Centre were attacked, on September 11, 2001, and a plane crashed into the supposedly impregnable Pentagon Building on the same day. It lost its bearings the day it decided to retaliate, by bombing the daylight out of Afghanistan. It lost its self-prescribed global moral leadership at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, where prisoners have been kept without the supposedly sacrosanct principle of due process; at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad, where prisoners’ endured repulsive torture; and with its unmanned killing machines – the drones.
But none of these forbidding incidents can reduce the senselessness and heartbreak of the Boston Marathon bombing. Three people are dead and hundreds maimed. Their lives will never be the same, not because of them asking why, but because they have lost limbs and and ability. None of the runners or spectators was in a war-zone mindset. They thought they were safe. Death, blood and tears were the farthest things from their minds.
Why men kill is an age-old question – philosophical, moral and existential. It is said there cannot be life without death, no good without evil, no love without hate. But the duality of life does not answer the question of why people can violate the sanctity of life and intentionally take it away.
On April 15, a Canadian astronaut, circling the Earth aboard the International Space Station, photographed the Boston explosions burning bright against a dark background. On that day in Boston, as it was on 9/11 in New York and Washington, the sky was a bright, clean blue, and as clear as crystal. Under it, unspeakable carnage took place. Nothing could be more contradictory and incongruous.
But again, man is so. There is no answer as to why man kills, only the question.
