Boston College Graduation, May 2002

Since Monday, I’ve been glued to the news, just like many of you. I’ve checked in with loved ones in Cambridge and Jamaica Plain and the friends from my own college years in Chestnut Hill, a peaceful town at the end of the green line. My cousin was watching the race close to the finish line, cheering as friends went by. I’m so grateful that she got hungry. She and her fiance were in a nearby restaurant when they heard the bombs go off.

An entire city is now locked inside and under surveillance during an unprecedented manhunt. Schools are closed, including Boston College. Military humvees are on the streets of Watertown. The police searched nearby Newton, where I lived freshman year. I remember watching the Boston Marathon from a street corner there, as the runners came around the bend and prepared to tackle Heartbreak Hill, a shallow, yet steady half-mile incline that must feel like it goes on forever when you’re over 20 miles into a marathon.

That heartbreak has taken on a whole new meaning… A child taken at his most innocent, graduate students younger than I am, and now another victim in the wrong place at the wrong time. Parents just getting to know their worst pain. The last mile of this year’s marathon dedicated to Sandy Hook victims, and the knowledge that there are now families who have experienced back-to-back terror. The added defeat in Washington, where the Senate couldn’t even expand gun control this week.

I remember another time Newton was part of unfathomable atrocity. During my senior year, two hijackers spent the night in a hotel there before they woke up very early and went to Logan Airport. At that time, I was on campus and worried about loved ones in New York. I didn’t own a cell phone, so I used the pay phone in the dining hall to check in on another cousin who worked downtown. Now, we have the personal technology to help the authorities and to document the experience in real time. It changes the speed and the means of how we absorb the event, but there’s so much we still don’t understand about each other.

Where do we go from here as a world so catastrophically divided? Many countries are, tragically, much more conditioned to this kind of attack, so I ask on behalf of all of us. We all come into this world the same way; we’ll all take a last breath. How can we go so far astray in between? I know there are international relations and radical beliefs involved, misunderstandings on all sides and, as a result, unfortunate racial profiling. A 17-year-old kid, a runner, misidentified as a suspect by the over-eager media was scared to go outside before the entire city joined him in another version of that fear.

Acts of valor and kindess emerge during these tragedies. People rush in to help the victims. They surround danger. They act. Humanity responds to humanity. I will try to focus on that when the questions don’t have answers.