Ask

Right around the time I caught news of today's tragedy surrounding the Boston Marathon, The Smith's "Ask" was playing in my headphones. It's easy to look for signs, connections, and reasons in the wake of tragedy, and I couldn't ignore the lyrics:

If it's not love, then it's the bomb that will bring us together.

It's an innocent enough sounding line out of context, but even aside from right now I'd always thought a bit prophetic, a bit of historical reference that has too much truth, part of the poetry of Morrissey's often mopey lyrics (of which I happen to be a fan). But the unity and bringing together of people in the wake of tragedies like this is always met with the counterpunch of divisiveness. People get caught up with blame and conspiracy. It's Patriot's Day, Lexington and Concord, start of the American Revolution. This and much other potential symbolism was on my brain, I couldn't avoid it.

These are things you connect to the why of someone would ever do this. There are a lot of reasons, and reason is a hard word to use, because reason I tend to connote with logic and it's only in the logic of the perverse mind that there's reason to kill off innocent people. It's left a lot of people not feeling good about the state of humanity, that acts like this are committed, but as terrible as I find this (I happen too to be a runner, and to know people who were running, and to know people who reside and work in the city), the last thing I would like to see is quantification to measure this tragedy, because tragedy is immeasurable. It's your own connection to the events that form your opinion on it.

I'll just hope we come out of this without the wrong people being blamed, and without overzealous response. We don't need more literal physical security, just people that don't do shit like this. I liked it better when bombing a marathon meant simply that you were physically wiped out and ran like shit.