Saturday, April 20, 2013

Crazy, Scary, Sad

That was quite a week for those of us here around Boston.

Terrorism? Angry? Psychotic? Sad? Misguided?

I saw a patient on Tuesday who said he and his two kids had watched the end of the marathon and he was about fifty yards away from one bomb and forty yards from the other.  He said he knew immediately what was going on and he just picked up his kids and ran out of the way.

We have a fried who lives in Watertown, about four blocks from where the first brother was killed.  The police came to her home, in full riot gear, with automatic weapons drawn and walked through the house making sure she was safe and no one was hiding.

Two kids, two brothers, shut down the whole Boston area, about five million people shut in their homes.

Perhaps the one brother captured will be able to give some kind of an explanation for his actions, but it will never make sense.  What allows someone to feel that they need to blow-up random people to make a point is never quite clear.  Yes, there are political grievances, where one group feels unfairly dominated and exploited by another group, and they feel the only way they can he heard or to get their plight noticed is to kill a few children, but even in those cases, if people really want to find a solution, it could be done.  But there are enough powerful people who don't want the problem solved.

History shows that there are always many people, especially those who take leadership roles, are either have a fanatical devotion to the cause, or a fanatical devotion to their own importance, to allow for any compromise.

That is happening now in our government, in several places in the Middle East, and in many other countries around the world.

The main concern of most people is first for their own safety, then for their own well-being, and then for the well-being of their family and core group.  Yes, there are many people who truly care about the welfare of people they don't know, and who may be far away.  Many of them, including myself, will do things to be helpful......to a point.... to the point where it sacrifices my own safety or well-being.  Sure, for a moment I have helped someone having a seizure, or I would pull a kid out of a lake, but probably not let them come live with me, or pay for them to go to college.

All of this still cannot explain what these boys did.  It must be more than just a psychological problem. On the reductionist end it is biological, down to the unfolding of proteins in the brain.  On the global scale it is related to the clash of cultures, ubiquitous saturation of violent images, and the well publicized examples of others who lose control.

The city, state and country must have spent millions of dollars and used thousands of people to track down and stop two young men. The forces of law and order did an excellent job -- perhaps using too many bullets.

All I can conclude from this that something like this will probably happen again within a few years. Again we will wonder why -- for the individual involved.  But the bigger causes, of people believing to strongly in things that really don't matter, will still be there.

1 comment:

Forsythia said...

Why do bad things happen ti good people? Who knows, but something like this happens every day somewhere in the world--it's just that this time, they picked "the wrong city to mess with," or the "right" one, depending on how much grief and publicity they hoped to generate. These two were so misguided, so lost, so stupid. No matter what the survivor says, it will make no sense.