Boston Strong

April 15th is another eventful date

Well. April 15th is another day that it seems like so many things happened throughout history. And for the most part, it seems like it has been a date on which a lot of truly tragic things happened. Honestly, I can only think of one really cool thing that happened on this date: it was the day that Jackie Robinson first debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. And as big a fan of baseball as I am, and as happy as I am about how far my favorite sport has come since that time, I can’t help but contrast that event with all the other terrible, tragic things that have happened on this day.

Of course, the most immediate thing for me is that this is the 3rd anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing. Hard to believe it has already been three years. But I am glad that Boston had really come together and bounced back.

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#BlackLivesMatter & #NoBoston2024 – The intersection of money, race & power

Anyone who isn’t a moneyed plutocrat in the very tiny ruling elite here in Boston – Marty Walsh, John Fish, Charlie Baker, and Shirley Leung, I’m looking at you – likely understands that yesterday’s announcement that Boston “won” the USOC nomination for the 2024 olympics is a Very Bad Thing. The Boston 2024 group has existed for about a year and, chaired by Fish, has been trying to essentially shame the populace into believing that if we do not do this thing, invite the world to come here for a 3 week-long party 9 years from now, we’re provincial losers and that Boston isn’t fit for the world stage.

To put it bluntly, the people at Boston2024 are liars.

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Send some love to Keytar Bear

If you live in the Boston area, odds are at some point you have seen Keytar Bear performing in or near an MBTA station. He’s one of those quirky things about Boston that I love so much.

But he will not be performing for a while, to the loss of all commuters.

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@MetroBOS thinks we’ve “lost the marathon spirit”

Twitter is hilarious. It has the tremendous power for good and also the power to do some really horrible stuff. Then stuff like this happens.

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A couple of clarifications

1) Yes, the bomb squad has had a busy day today in Boston. Yes, they did just blow up two things in controlled detonations (as in, within the last two minutes) at the Marathon Finish Line. Geoff and I are both fine and were nowhere near any of the controlled detonations today. Yes, there were more than just those two detonations, no, we were never in any danger.

2) To all the crazies/”patriots”/martyrs/whatever who think that today is a day for demonstrations of their ideologies by throwing backpacks full of stuff into random places: Go back under whatever rock you came from. We don’t want you, you will get caught and possibly killed, and your “message” just gets lost in the kerfuffle. Stop already, enough. April 15th is for paying taxes.

3) To the people heading up the security theater that now invades so much of our lives: I want my rights back. Catching the guy who tossed those backpacks into the middle of a heavily guarded street was no biggie. Stopping the guy who shot up KS yesterday? Not a whole lot of warning on that one despite his obvious history of hatred. Oh, and that was terrorism too, in case you missed the memo. Just because a white guy did it doesn’t mean it isn’t terrorism.

And finally, to leave the serious topics for a minute:

4) Geoffrey and Joffrey aren’t the same person, thank all the Gods. If you’re looking for information about the character on Game of Thrones who died, his name is Joffrey and that post is here. Geoffrey is my husband and he is a) not a psychopathic murdering boy king and b) very much alive.

~Kelly

ETA by Geoff: And c) I am very much loyal to the Starks and hate the Lannisters very very much. I am a true man of the North. Nyah.

Boston Strong all over again

Yesterday there was another tragedy in our fair city. A fire broke out in the Back Bay, one of the more tightly packed areas of the city, both architecturally and in terms of traffic. It quickly went to 9 alarms, sent 18 people to the hospital, destroyed the 4 story building where it started, and killed 2 firefighters.

9 city blocks were closed through this morning as 40+ mph winds whipped the fire into a frenzy. Backdraft type conditions made the fire merciless and the brave men and women kept fighting even when they knew that one of their comrades lay dead at the bottom of the building. Even when the fire leapt through the roof and reached for the sky, when floors collapsed and sprayed the surrounding houses with showers of embers, and when the smoke was so thick we could see it from Cambridge, they fought on for hours.

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We have come a long way indeed

Wow.

The new cover of Sports Illustrated talks about this amazing World Series win and features Big Papi and the three Boston police officers from some of the most iconic photos on the day of the Boston Marathon bombing. Those same three officers had been on a previous cover shortly after the bombing.

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It’s been a little over a week since downtown blew up and everything went to hell, but since then Boston Strong has become the catchphrase for how we’ve all held up. The whole tough New Englander attitude, some would say “crusty”, is well known. We’re tough people and down through generations we’ve been through a lot.

I have no idea who it was who coined the phrase. I hope it wasn’t some marketing VP somewhere who’s made a mint from it. It has helped, and it has spawned Watertown Strong and Collier Strong, on their own indications of what we’ve been through separately and together and how we’ll persevere.

Check out some of the images, below the cut, that have come up in the last week plus that I’ve liked the best or that I think are the funniest representation of Boston Strong.

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We will bounce back

Now that I have had some time to sort of process the events of the past week, I think I have managed to sort it all out inside my head. And so yesterday when a friend and parishioner asked me how I was doing and what I made of all this, I told him what I thought.

I said “This is Boston. We’ll bounce back. We always do.”

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Maybe this is the new normal?

At least for now.

We’re 48 hours out from the bombings and things are… different. It isn’t just the obvious police presence or the national guard people in uniform everywhere. Things are different. Yesterday everything was eerily calm, almost like the afternoon of 9/11 when all flights were grounded and nobody knew what was going on, except that yesterday there were helicopters in the air overhead and we were all waiting.

Waiting for news of who else was going to die. Waiting to hear from that last person or two that we hadn’t yet heard from. Waiting for news from the police, the feds, the various hospitals. Waiting. It was like life in suspended animation.

We were going to work and going through the motions, but everyone was asking the same thing, “Should we be doing this?” “Is this appropriate?” “What is the right thing to do now?”

Nobody has an answer for that. There is no single answer when there is a 15 block long scar in the middle of your city that was carved out by a coward with bombs, a bone to pick with humanity, a need to see his human fears and frailty writ large on the TV, and not enough guts or intelligence to make the change he wants to see from within the system.

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