Last night after the lockdown lifted, I went for a long walk in the park. It was dark and misty, and there were other people.
A couple days ago, I decided, fuck those guys, I was going to walk the marathon route (some day that's not the marathon) and next year I'm going to go watch. I bought a pedometer, and I'm going to try to increase my number of steps every day until I can do it; it's probably going to take me a couple years. I'm also going to start giving blood regularly.
I'm a soccer mom, pretty soon we will be going to the soccer game. In the rain. My daughter is already complaining. And afterwards, I, a witch, will pick up my Catholic daughters' Muslim friend and they will hang out together all afternoon, playing videogames, talking and laughing.
My daughters are trying to process what happened. Their dad told them that when they were toddlers, they all had dinner at the bombers' family's home. He knew the dad. We kept the girls away from the television, so what they heard was carefully filtered.
I'm struggling with it myself. I really wanted to hate those guys. But now that the terrorists are reduced to targeting and cultivating Americans to do their dirty work, well, they are Americans. They are us, and it's making me thoughtful. I never met the family, but the end result isn't terror or fear, just sadness and anger. Just a dopey kid who likes Game of Thrones and smoking pot and his douchebag older brother who probably would have ended up in jail on his own as a petty criminal.
Maybe I'm wrong and the douchebag older brother did this all on his own without any outside influence. I've been watching all the speculation here on dKos--teabagging rednecks!--and was annoyed it was done during all the brouhaha instead of waiting until we knew more, but now I'm speculating myself. I think Tamerlan was selected and cultivated to do this. Because he blended in, because he was white, somebody egged him on, fed him lies, and gave him tips on bomb-making. I want to go after those people. And not to kill them and make them martyrs, but to mock them as cowards who target kids to kill women and children, so nobody in the future listens to their bullshit.
Even so, those people may have won the battle (women and children were killed, people were maimed), but they have lost the war. Because people here in Boston like me aren't terrorized. We are filled with anger, pity and sadness. The family of the bomber was part of the community here. And whoever instigated this fucked with the wrong town.
Now maybe the media is going to blow this all out of proportion and try to push their own agendas on what happened and try to make us scared. But that's not going to work, because we are all witnesses. These guys were known, and everyone who knew them is going to speak up--this and not that, oh hey, I knew that guy, it was like this.