We wake up every day now knowing that even though terrorist won't keep us away from our beloved city of Boston, terrorist have caused us pain and left our collective commonwealth wounded. We continue to heal, but there will always be a scar.
There has been an endless outpouring of gratitude for the strangers who jumped in to help immediately after the bombings and saved lives; for the hospitals and trauma centers and their talented staff who didn't let anyone else die in the face of grave injuries. We are grateful for our our public safety officers, firemen and paramedics who tended to victims and provided comfort and for police of all uniforms who, with laser focus - found the two hoodlums who committed the horrendous crimes.
There is collective gratitude in Massachusetts for our country, commonwealth and city's leadership who came together and decided to shut down public transportation and ask people who live and work in the area neighborhoods to stay inside and lock their doors for their own safety.
Yesterday, when the Boston Globe reported about Ron Paul's op-ed article on a popular Libertarian website - an article that has now been quoted and reprinted by news sources 'round the world - that how-dare-you-talk-about-us-like-that anger surfaced:
In an article called “Liberty Was Also Attacked in Boston,” the former Republican congressman and two-time presidential candidate compares the intense April 19 manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to “scenes from a military coup in a far off banana republic.”
“The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city,” Paul writes. “This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.”
Paul argues that the Boston case sets a dangerous precedent, recounting scenes of “paramilitary police riding in tanks and pointing automatic weapons at innocent citizens.”
“Once the government decides that its role is to keep us safe, whether economically or physically, they can only do so by taking away our liberties,” Paul writes. “That is what happened in Boston.”
Did this nutcase see television reports from the neighborhoods that had endured house-to-house SWAT team searches?
After the battered bomber was taken into custody, residents came out of their houses, lined the streets and cheered and applauded the police cars as they left the area.
I don't think anyone in the Boston area on April 19th thought their civil liberties were being trampled on. The city trusted their leaders and they delivered.
I have images of David Ortiz, our own Big Papi, shouting at Ron Paul, "This is our F@#%ing city and no one can dictate our freedom!"
And when you consider Paul's perm-headed crazies-don't-fall-far-from-the-nut-tree legacy ... can't you just see Big Papi adding with his fabulous Dominican accent, "and your leettle dog, too!"
Don't mess with Boston. Not now. You don't know anything about us. Talk about something else. This is none of your f@#ing business.
Why do people vote for these idiots?
I really believe that as new generations infiltrate the voting bases that elect people like the Pauls, we'll hit the refresh button and flush them out.
Residents of Watertown applaud police cars as they pull out of their neighborhood after catching the second bomber