...to the East

Writing about the Boston Marathon bombings is difficult for a number of reasons.  For one thing, these stories have a tendency to move quickly, thus one runs the risk of sounding a bit dated by the time thoughts go to print.  Secondly, what else is there, really, left to say?  What words haven’t been written by this point?  What ideas haven’t been brought to light, battered about, and then rearranged?  As mentioned by multiple commentators, such travesties seem to happen so often anymore that dealing with the aftermath, collectively as a culture, has taken upon an almost eerie redundancy.

 Like many Americans on Friday morning, April 19th, I listened in slack jawed awe as radio announcers narrated the most recent events, their own voices, generally so subdued, taut with apprehension.  A carjacking.  A shootout.  A car chase with homemade bombs being tossed from the escape vehicle.

            

 Homemade bombs tossed from a stolen car?

            

 This wasn’t news; this was modern-day yellow journalism from a Hearst paper.

            

 As I turned off the radio that morning and walked into school, my mind, strangely enough, thought back to a comic book movie.  I reflected on the last scene of Batman Begins, when the Dark Knight stands on a rooftop with Commissioner Gordon.  While pleased with the help that Batman had offered the city, Gordon laments the new dynamic that the hero’s existence represents.

            

 He represents an amplification of carnage, Gordon assumes.  An arms race, so to speak, between the forces of good and evil.  The movie ends with Gordon handing Batman the calling card of Gotham’s newest menace:  the Joker.  This scene, of course, leads us directly into the forthcoming sequel.

            

 It seems we live in that world now; this world of sequels.  If we’ve learned anything from the messy death of Osama bin Laden two years ago or this most recent story of violence and retribution, it is this:  civilization won’t end because of terrorism.  If a menace targets the United States, that menace, eventually, will be killed.

            

 The terrorists won’t win if for no other reason than they’re hopelessly outnumbered.  A deft combination of both federal and local law enforcement, along with civilian cooperation, brought down the Tsarnaev brothers.  They also won’t win because terrorism, as a political strategy, just doesn’t work very well when used against people willing to invest their treasure and their blood in a concerted effort to stop it.

           

But I think another lesson we must consider in all of this is that the Disneyfied version of our collective narrative is very much over.  There will be no permanent armistices in our various wars on evil.  Not really.  After all, Batman has been fighting crime since 1939.  Spiderman, Superman, Captain America?  Their stories never end.  They never get to retire. True, they might stop the bad guys by the end of the issue, but there is always next month’s edition.

            

 This is not meant to be depressing or fatalistic, and I’m certainly not making light of these tragedies by discussing them at the same time as super heroes.  Overall, I’m hopeful about the future and life in general, but not because I believe that a day is approaching when all the terrorists with homemade bombs, or all the crazy people with stolen assault rifles, or all the dictators with bored armies suddenly decide to give up.

            

 My hope stems from the belief that there are more heroes in the world, such as Charles Ramsey, who helped rescue the kidnapped women in Cleveland, than there are villains.  It stems from the understanding that light travels much further and more efficiently than darkness, as we can see in Rachel Scott, who was killed by the Columbine monsters in 1999 and who still inspires people to this day.

            

 My hope rests on the belief that despite all the evil in the world, despite all the bombs and the poisons and the hate, our lives are still a gift from a sovereign God.  They are gifts worth fighting for and worth protecting. 

            

 Next April, tens of thousands of people will compete in the 2014 Boston Marathon.  The vast majority of them will not run because they believe they can win; they will run to compete bravely because it is a privilege and an honor.  On that day, law enforcement personnel and others will keep out a watchful eye, not because they believe they can save everyone in the world, but because it is a duty and an honor to fight for those they can.

            

 We’ve each been called to run our race, we’ve all been called to fight our fight, because in the end, it’s not so much about defeating evil as it’s about battling against it until reinforcements arrive.