Standing With Boston

I grew up in Merrick, NY, on Long Island.  I lived there for 18 years before heading to Boston.  It is the home to which I returned when not in school.  NYC was a playground for me as teen.  We'd drive in or take the train, and head to the Village, the West Side, Central Park, Times Square, all over.  In 2001 I was driving back to NY.  As I crossed the Verrazano bridge into Brooklyn I switched to the news station for a traffic report.  The first plane hit the north tower seconds later.  Moments after that the towers come into view.  Smoke is pouring from the impact site.  The security of my first home had been destroyed.  It changed New York and New Yorkers.  Famous for their lack of eye-contact in the street as they rush from place to place, suddenly people slowed in the street, they smiled at each other.  People looked for connection amidst our shared pain and sorrow.  Everyone had a story.  Everyone had been touched.

On April 15 two homemade bombs were detonated at the Boston Marathon.  I spent four years at Brandeis University, in Waltham outside Boston.  I had decided I wanted to go to university in Boston when I was 10.  I decided on Brandeis when I was 15.  It is a city I love, and a city I consider home.  Once again a home of mine had been violated.  Waltham was among the cities on lock down to find the suspect.  In the weeks that have followed, again we are dominated by the stories. This time its not only the stories of the victims, witnesses, and survivors.  We also have the stories of the perpetrators.  We want so much more than connections with those like us.  We want to understand.  We somehow want reassurance that this won't happen again.

Unfortunately that is a goal of terrorism.  It doesn't really matter if these brothers were connected to a larger cell or organization.  There are and always will be those who are hate-filled, and they will be able to recruit the disaffected.  It does not matter if these individuals connect or not.  We must be ever vigilant, while they need only to succeed once.  But in all cases we must not allow them to win.  The win is not the success in bombing.  The win is the terror.  It is the fear and the suspicion bred through post-tramatic stress that prevents us from going on with our lives.  The terrorists won the battle in 2001 when they glued each of us to our television sets with despair, but we came back stronger.  We hugged our children and each other, and we changed the channel.  We went on.  Love, honor, and loyalty make us stronger than those who hate.  As long as we stand together, as long as we can hold onto this we will continue to win, and to build a better world.