On A Day in April; A Meditation on Superheroes

Here in MA we have a holiday called Patriot's Day, and it usually falls somewhere around the time of the end of tax season. This year, Tax Day and Patriot's Day were the same day. So was the annual Boston Marathon. Whilst watching the goings on from our accountant's office, there was an explosion near the finish line. Shrapnel shot out everywhere with deadly intent. An 8-year old boy was killed. Two young women were killed, a student and restaurant manager with a bright smile and a sweet nature. Others were maimed and still others wounded.  First responders raced to the scene to help. Runners in the race came to help including a doctor who finished the race and then ran over to treat the wounded. Ordinary people became superheroes on that day in April. But they weren't the kind who could repel bullets or scale walls or even fly or run at incredible speeds. And whether Superman or Spider-Man or the Flash could've gotten there in time to stop the carnage is an open question. It's always great when these things are averted, and we've been incredibly fortunate. But it was really only a matter of time. We wouldn't be able to get to all of them. Stop all of them. That may be too much to ask even of mythic characters like Superman.

So since we don't have super speed, X-ray vision, or the proportionate strength and speed of a spider, we have to rely on our ability to be one step ahead of people like Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and his brother Dzhokar, a couple of homegrown terrorist wannabes who learned how to build pressure cooker bombs on the internet and used an international gathering as practice for more disruptions later. This time, we didn't get all the intel we could have gotten and we didn't connect the dots fast enough. And the attack went off. Even the Batman might not have been able to stop it in time. The device was activated with a cell phone as the two brothers walked calmly away. Is the Flash fast enough to outrun the signal?  That's the problem with superhumans. They're still human in the end, and humans miss things. But what makes the folks who rushed in to help super is the strength of their connection to each other, amplified by the communal energy from all over the world gathered in one place at one moment. In moments like that, we're as powerful as any strange visitor from another planet with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. That's why these two losers were taken down before the week was out. Tamerlan was killed in a gunfight with Boston PD, and Dzhokar finally surrendered and is in prison at Devens, awaiting trial. That's why they won't get a chance to try anything else in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or anywhere else.

Margaret Thatcher, who was committed to the ground in England while we were here chasing down bad guys seemed in her life a proponent of a very rigid kind of individualism. But it wasn't individualism that took out the Tsarnaev brothers. It wasn't an individual superhero who stopped them. It was a collective will and consciousness that demanded they be caught and held responsible for trying to terrorize us into paying attention to their half-formed, ill-advised political discontent.

And no less a superhero than David Ortiz, Big Papi himself arrived just in time to give us all a sense of closure when he said, his uniform saying Boston in big red letters, "This is our !@#$^& city!"

So say we all.
It's going to take a damned sight more than a couple of junior jihadi apprentices to take us down.
And Admiral Adama, along with all of Boston and the whole Commonwealth of MA said:
SO SAY WE ALL!!

I should add here that Edward James Olmos' remarks here at the UN sort of explain why there are people who need to do what was done in Boston on that day in April. As long as this need to "otherize" people exists, there will be acts of destruction of this type or another, and it's also why we will continue to need heroes, super or not, to remind us of what we all have in common.

More Later
KCD