It’s hard to imagine raising children in a world like this.
My heart goes out to anyone tasked with explaining the events in Boston to their little ones. I’m sure some will choose to shield them from the television coverage entirely while others will sit their kids down and explain it to them the best they can.
It’s hard for me to tell what the best approach would be.
This is just the world we live in now. Something as wholesome as a marathon can turn into a spectacle of destruction and blood in an instant. Fresh on the heels of the Sandy Hook massacre that left 20 young children and six adult staff members of the school dead — it’s now common for our TV screens to be filled with images of terror.
It’s hard not to become hopeless.
Yet, in the midst of all the chaos, we always see the same images that prevent us as a nation and us as human beings from sinking into a permanent existential chasm.
It’s a cliché, but during every crisis you see it — people not running away from the carnage but running towards it, to help.
I’ll be honest, I can be pretty skeptical at times. I have a pretty low opinion on the motives and actions of a good portion of the human race.
They steal. They cheat. They screw each other over. They kill each other with bombs.
But, in the face of circumstances that are unimaginable unless you’ve already experienced them, in the midst of the chaos of the bombing in Boston, people immediately ran into the mess to help their fellow men and women.
Three people were killed in the attack and more than 170 were injured. Miraculously, at the time of this writing, none of the other 170 have died.
Thanks to the help of their fellow man, despite the horrific nature of the injuries people in the blast radius received, no additional casualties have been recorded.
This whole episode has me pretty messed up.
We still don’t know who did it or why. We may not for a while.
But this I do know: no matter what, in the face of unspeakably evil acts, people do rise to the occasion. People show their inherent goodness they may otherwise mask from the rest of the world.
It’s hard to imagine explaining what happened in Boston to a child.
Where would I even begin?
I’d say someone did something very bad, but a lot more people helped do something good.