Thoughts From Boston 1: What They Attacked
Greetings from Boston, where we have had one hell of a week.
Boston is my adoptive home--that is to say, I adopted it as an adult and chose to raise my children here. I take this stuff personally not only because the attack took place on a street where I spend a lot of time--its right across from the Boston Public Library, one of the great public spaces in this city--but also because they struck at things I really like about this place.
The Marathon, though I haven't been in years, is an event that really shows Boston at its best. People turn out in by the hundreds of thousands to watch an incredibly dull sporting event where only a tiny fraction of the spectators have any idea who the potential winners are.
And everybody cheers like mad. They cheer for the winners, and they cheer even louder for the people who are just running. The people who died on Monday were cheering on regular people trying to do something extraordinary. They were not being provincial, or jingoistic, or racist, or any of the things that sometimes accompany sports fandom: they were cheering for everybody.
It's always wrong to murder people, but murdering them while they are in the midst of a celebration of everything that's good about people seems especially heinous.
One of the things I really value about this city is that it is, in many ways, kind of a small town. It's small not only in the sense of its physical size, but in this sense: I am two degrees of separation away from both the younger bomber and two of his victims.
It's unusual for a city this small to be such an international city, and it's another of my favorite things about this place. I have taught students from Haiti, The Dominican Republic, Trinidad,Jamaica, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Ghana, Uganda, China, Morocco, Burma, Vietnam, and Chechnya. My son's best friends are from Sierra Leone and Montserrat. I work with people from Jamaica, Haiti, Bosnia, Guatemala, and even Buffalo.
I'm proud to live in a place that welcomes people from all over the world and where so many different cultures come together to make this a better and more interesting place to live. If we give in to the mistrust and xenophobia that these guys have stoked, we'll lose one of the best things about this place.
One of my Moroccan students came in with his beard trimmed in an uncharacteristic style last week. He said he was afraid that muslims were behind the bombing, so he'd gone to a Dominican barber and asked for a Dominican look.
I'm really sad that he felt like he had to do that. I'm also sad that he might be right.
The best way for us to fight this kind of crap is not to turn inward and stop welcoming the rest of the world--it's to more vigorously embrace the stuff that these guys attacked.
