I was cleaning leaves out of the flower beds at the new house when I heard the news and hoped that #1 child was in class today in Framingham and not taking the day off to watch a race in person. She hasn’t texted me back yet. She’s probably just busy.
It’s taken 12 years for terrorism to go after soft targets here in the US. I expect there will be another round of shrieking about how we must go after brown skinned people and clamp down even more and subject each other to even more interrogation and frisking. But there are more than 300 million of us and we will all grind to a halt, some of us cowering under our beds, and the country will be no safer from soft target terrorism.
Maybe this time, we’ll think before we invade, although I’m sure the military contractors would prefer we are thoroughly freaked out by today’s turn of events.
Yes, I’m pissed off and I’m very sad for the victims. But I haven’t lost my mind yet. This time, we need to keep our collective heads cool because as far as we know, the soft target terrorism is just beginning and we don’t know yet who is responsible.
Filed under: General | Tagged: bombing, Boston Marathon |
The Confluence 
Yeah, as my cousin mentioned, almost everything we’ll hear in this first 24 hours will be wrong. Maybe deliberately wrong.
Whatever the why’s …. it is a sad day for sure.
Hoping you hear from #1 Daughter soon. Waiting can be tough even when you know things are probably fine.
My kids tend to be pretty unsentimental sorts. They don’t seem to worry about me worrying.
Drives me nutz.
Schools are closed today in MA. Most colleges, too, public and private. It’s a state holiday. You have my sympathies. My son and his wife were there today. They’re OK. Pretty shaken up. They were unable to call for awhile because the police banned cell phones because they didn’t know what detonated the bombs. Not a time that “no news is good news”. But unless your daughter is a real marathon enthusiast (my son runs the race), she probably didn’t wander into the city. The race route goes right through Framingham so she could have seen it from there.
Good to know. Maybe they’re investigating the whole route which is why I can’t seem to reach her. Or maybe she’s just being insensitive. She *did* call me when she was evacuated from Lahaina because of the Tsumani warning so you’d think she’d check in.
My parents were totally disinterested in my activities and it would never occur to them to wonder about family members at risk in a disaster area. So, I used to be really sloppy about checking in with roommates and friends.
But that changed when I came back from visiting family at home and found my roommate in a complete meltdown because I had left without any notice to her.
It turned out that when she was 12-ish her dad and brother had gone canoeing (without letting the rest of the family know) and they never came back. Their canoe flipped and they drowned and (because of the spontaneity & lack of communication) it took WAY too long for the family to figure out what had happened.
Communication doesn’t have to mean you (we) are making a big deal about something. It just means we’re staying in touch. I’ve never forgotten the lesson.
Today is April,15th, tax day.
Homegrown.
Wouldn’t surprise me. Today is Patriot’s day in MA and the approximately the anniversary of the start of the American Revolution. “Listen my children and you will hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, On the 18th of April in 75, hardly a man is now alive who remembers that famous day and year.”
Tax-protester Andrew Kehoe added several new features to domestic terrorism. He had an initial distracting event to draw emergency responders away from the scene of the main attack. He added the car bomb. And he added the suicide bombing.
With a reputation for thriftiness, Kehoe was elected treasurer of the Bath Consolidated School board in 1924. While on the board, Kehoe fought endlessly for lower taxes. He blamed the previous property tax levy for his family’s poor financial condition
Up until the Oklahoma City bombing, Bath, Michigan, was the single deadliest act of domestic terrorism/mass murder in US history.
On May 18, 1927, 45 people, mostly children, were killed and 58 were injured when disgruntled and demented school board member Andrew Kehoe dynamited the new school building in Bath, Michigan.
Full text, with photos, of the book on the Bath School Disaster by M. J. Ellsworth.
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011193.html
When I heard the news a laundry list of suspects went thru my head. From North Korea to Islamic radicals to Irish dissidents and finally since it’s Patriot’s Day, some home grown militia upset because Obama looked a their guns funny.
Forgot to add, a member of one of those wedding parties Obama blew up with his drones.
glad about the flower beds, anyway…
Every year 30,000 gun owners commit suicide with their weapons. That alone is not only far worse than all the terrorist incidents put together but it happens every year.
That doesn’t count the other incidents be they by gun (Newtown, CT) or bomb (Atlanta, Oklahoma City, Boston).