Something terrible has happened in Boston ...'
I said these words a few hours ago to my Mum who, bed-bound, was trying to attract my attention for the umpteenth time today. The terrible news tumbled across Twitter like a plague, updates so corrupt they stained my timeline.
Speculation and conjecture filled the 24 hour news networks, impossible footage looping endlessly as a phalanx of experts on counter terrorism droned on. It was this type of bomb, it's terrorism, it's domestic, it's international. It's all piss in the wind until the phorensics guys cough up some answers.
Two things hit me tonight as I scanned the airwaves, searching for a reason, an explanation to help me understand why this happened. Firstly, not an original thought by any means; how brave are those people we see running
towards danger? People are screaming, there's blood and gore and flying debris, yet these men and women move, quickly, calmly,
into the mêlée, their first instinct to help. Heroism, masquerading as a day job.
The second thought came as I watched a young left-wing politico, Owen Jones, get buried under an avalanche of opprobrium. He'd had the temerity to express firstly his revulsion at events in Boston but then, prompted by a correspondent, equal disgust at the day's atrocities in the Middle East. The point is a salient one. As the west weeps for those killed and maimed on the streets of a US city, mothers bury their children in war-torn countries as they do day in, day out.
On this day, April 15th 2013, 31 people died in bomb attacks in Baghdad. In Israel people run onto buses and detonate suicide vests. In Palestine families huddle as their neighbours rain hatred upon their homes. In 1991 commuters died when an IRA bomb exploded in a rubbish bin on London's Victoria station, a bomb funded by men and women collecting money in Boston pubs for 'the Cause'.
The world is a twisted place. How we view it depends on where we stand. But there is something that strikes deep within us all when this happens at a celebration of human endeavour, a place where skin, rank, sexuality, size, wealth, disability, gender, politics and, yes, even bloody religion, count for nothing. City marathons are festivals of equality, each one an affirmation of togetherness and life.
Tonight I stand with the people of Boston. On Sunday I will stand with the people of London, for hour after hour, cheering the runners, the walkers, the stragglers and the loonies in fancy dress, raising millions for people less fortunate than themselves.
Whoever these people in Boston turn out to be, whatever they think they represent, I hope they suffer endless grievous torment for what they did today.
