I am hearing a lot of buzz words since the horrific blast in Boston today, like "hunt down perpetrators", "messages to the world", "not be fearful" and so on.
Let me tell you a little tale: On September, 10, 2001, around 8 p.m, I reported to security a tiny plush toy I'd found stuffed in between the grab arm and the wall near my unit (a post partum and med.surg unit) at an LA Hospital. The security guy asked me "Why?" I told him that it was his JOB to determine whether something so inocuous-looking could be a bomb.
The other people on my unit, hearing me make this call, looked at me as if I had grown a third head. The security guy said he'd send someone up to take care of it.
Meanwhile, RN's, CNA's, MD's, housekeeping and I gathered in the break room, and I explained my caution: it was simply this- the terrorism WILL hit the USA. It WILL hit Canada. People YOU KNOW will be killed in these manners.
I lived in Israel for two years. I have been: evacuated, along with everyone else, from an entire campus (Hebrew U of Jerusalem) when a bomb went off (killed the killers, too; half of him landed in a nearby tree, and her head was bouncing off down toward Beit Ha Sprinzak); I have been in Tel Aviv bus station, three separate times, when the bomb unit was called to disarm: A cigarette packet (a bomb), a briefcase no one claimed (not a bomb) and a brown paper parcel (a bomb).
I was on a bus tooling from my kibbutz to Nazareth, when the driver stopped the bus and said, loudly, "OFF THE BUS!" and within seconds of the last person bolting from the bus, the bomb (WHICH WAS UNDER MY SEAT and RIGHT BEHIND THE DRIVER) went off.
I told my little group, ON SEPTEMBER 10, 2001, in the break room, that we were lucky. We've been lucky. We've also been arrogant, bullheaded and, well, arrogant comes back around again.
The toy? I looked up to see a Neanderthal in a rent-a-cop uniform, standing in the doorway, with the plush toy, saying "Were you talking about this?"
I could do nothing more than shake my head, and follow an RN's request to discharge (in a wheelchair) a new mom and baby. As I stood in front of the hospital, waiting for her husband to bring the car around, I looked up and saw a 737 fly over our hospital (we were very close to Burbank Airport) and, hand to Goddess, thought "I wonder what I'd do if I saw the plane heading, not over, but at, us. Would I run? Would I try to get take the wheelchair with me? Would I have any time whatsoever to do anything at all?"
Her husband picked her up and took her home. I finished out my day. September 10, 2001. Went home. Told the hubs what had happened, and I asked him, "Am I paranoid?" He hugged me, and said, "Of all of the people I know, you have the most reason to be paranoid."
Next morning... September, 11, 2001.
And for every "foreign" bomber who have hit the US, I can name three home grown Christian whackjobs who've done EXACTLY THE SAME THING. To other Americans. Christians mostly.
It's early days, to be sure. My first thought today was "Did McVeigh have a brother? How about the guy who buried the schoolbus in California? Ed Gein? John Wayne Gacy? HH Mudgens? The Hillside Stranglers? The Train track killer? The 'In Cold Blood' murderers?
"The nutcase who killed the people by shooting high powered weapons from a tower on a Texas campus? The Olympics bombing in 1996?
"Lee Harvey Oswald?" And on, and on, and on, and on, and on.
Early days. Horrific death. Unbelievable mangling and "enclosed" compression injuries (and if you don't know what ECI's are, essentially? They liquify your innerds.)
And the truly fucked part of it all? There's not thing one we can do about it.
Any of it. Well, one thing: we can stop being so goddam arrogant, thinking that 'we're' somehow protected, by Goddess, or Mohammed, or the Simpson's Giant Glass Bubble.
My heart breaks for the death; my heart cracks for the loved ones left behind, and for the victims of ECI's: they look perfect on the outside. Inside? Jello.
Time to call about those plush toys, people. It's taken us 12 1/2 years to lose our fear, and retain our arrogance.
Early days.