The Marathon

photo by  Aaron Tang/wikipedia

Over the weekend and early Monday, the news was that the bipartisan support  in the U.S. Senate for a watered-down version of the least controversial gun regulation proposal was breaking down.  It was further evidence that the central government of the most powerful nation in the world can't even enact a measure that in any sensible society would have been on the books for a century.  All last week the news was about the heroic efforts to get Congress just to pass some laws that would indicate that we live in a civilized society, not to mention save people from horrific violence and death.  All that effort for what should be automatic, and with far more complex and threatening problems not only unresolved but not seriously addressed.  Not exactly inspiring.

Then came the bombs at the Boston Marathon, and to the possibly fatal dereliction of duty in Washington, the overwhelming power of big money to swamp democracy, poison the present and slaughter the future, a few different features of the American present came forward to contest this fatalism.

On the suddenly bloody streets of Boston, there was competence.  The bombs exploded near the finish line of the Marathon, which happens to be just a few blocks from where I used to work every day in the then-offices of the then-Boston Phoenix.  No central city in America is blessed with more or better medical resources in a compact area, and the Marathon itself had a triage and treatment tent already set up nearby.  But beyond that, the competence and courage, of EMTs and other personnel, including instant volunteers, as well as those who set up response procedures, speaks well for our capabilities in future emergencies, whatever their cause.  Skills, discipline, the temperament to use those skills: the calling to learn them and use them.

And there was kindness.  People who rushed towards the horrific scene in order to help survivors. Runners who kept running to the hospitals, to give blood.  Bostonians who volunteered their homes for the many out-of-towners (including international visitors) in Boston for the Marathon, who couldn't get back to hotels zoned off in the crime scene blocks.

If anything is going to save any of us, it will be the competence and kindness of the non-rich, and the courage to apply both.  "You'd do the same for me" rises to the occasion again. Not just kindness, but to be impelled to help, to anticipate how to help.

 There are less noble forces at work right now, sacrificing the poor, the old and the otherwise helpless and unconnected non-rich.  That ignored war against the anonymous is only going to get bigger and worse as all kind of things tighten.  But these countervailing qualities are still alive, at least in vivid emergencies.  Maybe in this marathon emergency we can build on that.