Future

I cried this afternoon. I was sat, reading about two of the hundreds affected by the Boston Explosions.

Martin Richard was 8 years old and waiting at the finish line to give his father,who was running, a hug. 8 years old. This boy will never finish school, he won't see his senior prom, he will never have a wedding day or children of his own. His life hadn't even started yet and yet it was snatched away in a single second. His mother has suffered brain injuries, and his six year old sister has lost a leg.

The second, Carlos Arredondo, ran into the smoke to help those injured. He vaulted a fence, running  right into the centre of what had happened.  He helped paramedics move a man with severed legs, into a wheelchair and ran alongside him, talking to him so that he wouldn't lose consciousness.  One photograph shows him seemingly pinching the man's femoral artery shut whilst paramedics loaded him into an ambulance. Mr Arredondo recently lost both his sons. Nine years ago, his son, then twenty, died in action in Afghanistan, his second committed suicide shortly after in 2011 as the troops withdrew from the war that had claimed his brother's life. Mr Arredondo became a peace activist and was attending the race to support charities Samaritans and  Fallen Maine which is a charity established to honour the lives of Marines lost since September 11th 2001.

 One of the runners had dedicated the race to Mr Arredondo's son.

It doesn't make sense to me, that if this was indeed a terror attack, that anyone could claim this for the love of a God. God, whatever, or whoever, you conceive him to be, is about love. Yet, yesterday claimed the lives of innocent people raising money for charities which help others who are less fortunate, in need, or in remembrance. When your act of 'love' has changed a day for the worse, when it has snatched lives which should have another sixty odd years in them, when it instilled terror in what should have been a collective celebration of the human condition for unity, just how, how can that be justified?

The attention is on those responsible, but the fact is, we will remember those who tried to salvage some feeling of safety. And yet, in this truly shambolic world, people like Carlos Arredondo exist. In the face of tragedy and hatred, they exist. They rise, and strive to try and fix the remains of a city street where the consequences of a single act will go down in the history books forever. It will happen, it shouldn't, but it does. But as long as it does, we will rise. Together.