14 thoughts on “Are you guys all right?”

  1. Thanks, Helen – I’m in San Antonio, thousands of miles away, I don’t even know if anyone I might know was running in the marathon.
    But Fiesta San Antonio starts next week (this week for some of the early bird events) and for three weeks there’s nothing but parades, athletic events, art shows, theater shows, public gatherings, food fairs and block parties. Yeah – my daughter says we are so not going downtown for any of these events. And I am certain that our local police are having litters of kittens about security.

  2. We have Thatcher’s funeral and the London marathon next Sunday coming up. I shall certainly avoid the marathon. I always do. But the funeral is something else. Everyone I know is going unless they really cannot get away from work. I remember some IRA bombs going off not too far from where I live and a friend saying hysterically that she was not going down to that shopping street again. I asked her whether she was going to venture out of doors at all.

  3. I take a bit of a different tack. This behavior will not change the way I live my life or change what I choose to attend one iota. Live free or die. We will find out who did this and hopefully get them.

  4. Dan, we never go downtown for Fiesta – the traffic is murder and the crowds are horrific … well, there was the year when my semi-occassional employer took us to NIOSA. That’s the food-festival in old La Villita – which is fun, but usually beer soaked. The food is good, though…

  8. I work two blocks down Dartmouth St., but had the day off. We will have normal MBTA service tomorrow, except they will bypass the Copley stop, so I guess I’ll be at work. There may be a “person of interest” at Brigham & Women’s Hospital — heavy security.

  9. I’m a thousand miles away at the moment, but years ago I used to work at the Boston Public Library. It was a long time ago, and the library is/was closed on Patriot’s day, and I always avoided the whole area during the Marathon… still, it is weird to see a place which has been part of one’s everyday life for years shown in the news with bombs going off. I guess I’m lucky to have lived a life of peace and quiet where such stuff is unusual.

  10. The Mass General is holding a press conference. The best place to treat such an event is probably there and was the LA County General Hospital.

    I’m not sure it is any more. In the Watts Riots, the LAC admitted about 176 gunshot wounds of the trunk. Three died. One a month later. That was 1965.

    The Mass General admitted hundreds after the Cocoanut Grove Fire in 1942. Modern burn care dates from that event although the doctors at Mass General had learned a lot from Pearl Harbor, which was a few months earlier.

  11. I’m watching a hockey game because I refuse to listen to hours of hysterical speculation and media guessing. Every single thing the media reported about Katrina, or any number of other events, turned out to be wrong and had to be corrected a few days or weeks later, long after the damage of all the rumor mongering had been done.

    Given what I’m hearing about the timing of the explosions, I doubt it was any big, professional plot. It sounds like they were two hours or more late for the big crowds, for one thing.

  12. What Dan said.

    The week after 9-11 my wife and I were booked for a flight to Europe. Didn’t know until the day of departure whether the flight would go. I was disgusted with Americans who tolerated that sort of shut down, grieved that our flight from our city to the overseas connecting flight had only 3 passengers, and utterly disgusted with travel hassle since then.

    When my granddaughter came by this afternoon and told us the sad news from Boston, I commented to my wife the exact same thing I said upon witnessing via live TV the 2nd plane hit the Trade Towers: “We are about to lose a lot of freedom.” That was not my first thought, which was, “Shudder, I just witnessed a lot of people dying.” But it was my second thought and first comment.

  13. We watched last weekend an old Lamb interview with Thatcher. She described her response to the Brighton bombing. Her stoicism was a model; so is the Israeli toughness. Today Boston appears like that – people rushed forward, competent, gentle.

    But what I hope even more is cool headed action, useful prevention. Those people today were tested, those countries bought their stoicism with hard experience. It would be nice to see them as models in a purely theoretical way, but that may be whistling past the graveyard.

    On a cheerful note – Instapundit links to the Atlantic: the bomber is faced straight on: the good outnumber you.

  14. I live on the Marathon route at mile 5 which means 5 miles to the end. For the elite runners that’s minutes. I like to take my little dog Dinah to see the first of the race, which is the wheelchair guys. I love them. We cheer and cheer and cheer when they go by.

    That’s what’s so fun about the Boston Marathon. It snakes through suburbs and city, up hills and around corners. It’s 26 miles and when the wheel chair guys are going by at 10am there are already people cheering all along the 26 mile way. They’re also grilling and setting out chairs for the afternoon. Local restaurants set up street tables, it’s a 26 mile block party. And they’re still cheering at 5pm when the last of the last are crossing the finish line.

    The marathon is not about the elite runners. We love them. But we love more everybody else running, cheering, loving, grilling, celebrating, because it’s just so much fun, and it’s spring and winter is over.

    Because we love life.

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