I am hating what's going on in Boston. I am afraid for my son, who blithely spent last night at a punk show in New Haven, who goes to school two hours away from Cambridge. He is not in danger. His is fortunate enough to attend a campus full of peaceniks and potheads. Nonetheless, I am afraid for him, and for my friends who live in the Boston area, and for my own past, when I lived there. All of this is foolish. But, oh, those little damaged children. . . .
This is a dumb post, but there you have it.
2 comments:
"Radical Islam is, in part, the story of urbanization over the past half-century across North Africa and the Greater Middle East…. It is the very impersonal quality of urban life, which is lived among strangers, that accounts for intensified religious feeling."
Robert D. Kaplan, "The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate." Reviewed by Malise Ruthven, NYRB, March 6th, 2013
My researches this morning after the arrest of the Caucasian boy, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, have taken me to the extraordinary leader he was named after at his birth in 1994, Dzhokhar Dudayev, as well as back to the one his older brother was named after at his, the 14th C. Turkic superhero, Tamerlane (Tamburlaine, Timur) -- then even farther back to the Turco-Mongolian, Genghis Khan, then forward to the great Persian, Babur Beg, founder of the Mughal Empire etc. etc. etc. And we're still in Watertown!
The great hope must surely be the warmth, determination, and patience displayed by the people of Boston in the last 24 hours -- the tragedy that the Boston Marathon was an expression of exactly the same human qualities, combined, of course, with joy.
I wondered if I was the only purpose who thought of Tamburlaine. I hadn't heard anyone in the media mention the link, and believe me, I've heard a lot from the media. There's been nothing else on the airwaves in New England.
Post a Comment