Defiance

40 B4 40
8 days to go  (aaaaahhhh - when you skip a few days the numbers drop so precipitously!)


Everyone watches the news and feels for the families.  We all grieve and hold each other a bit more tightly when we have collective weeks like this that rock us, again and again, with back to back nightmares that keep us glued to the 24 hour news cycle.

This morning my mind is rattling around with how different my own, personal, reactions are to each of this week's horrifying stories.  First, a bombing at the Boston Marathon - 3 lost and 176 injured/hospitalized.  Now, an explosion at a fertilizer plant in small-town Texas - initial estimates of 70 lost and unknown injured, this morning's reports are more manageable at 15 lost and 160 hospitalized. 

Both terrible, tragic events.  Both sudden and without warning.  Both streaming live into our livingrooms.  And yet - my heart and my head are world's apart on how they are reacting to each. 

I'm not angry about the Texas explosion.  I'm terribly sad for that town and those families, they remind me of my own small town of Wickenburg, AZ and I imagine many of the families that I grew up with being affected in this way.  The brothers and uncles and guys we went to JrHi with as volunteer firefighters trying to evacuate and rescue people they've known all their lives.  The teachers and nurses rushing to help in schools & nursing homes and each being faced with familiar faces that are today in terrible pain and fear. 

With news like this West, TX explosion - my mind goes immediately to what the Red Cross can and will be doing to help in the days and weeks (and months...) to come.  I start calculating the sheltering needs, trying to learn what's left of the town to support the response and from that - from how far away help must travel in this part of Texas.  Wondering how many people have friends and family unscathed that will take them in and how many others will rely on the open hearts and hands of our volunteers and partners that will leave their own friends and family to take the very best care of these strangers.  I'm proud and hopeful and calm.  They will hurt and they will grieve, certainly - but all will be OK in this town, they will come back together, and they will be ever stronger for it.

But I'm not angry, and I am not afraid.  This explosion was an accident and accidents happen, don't they?

Perhaps more telling, I am not definant when learning of the Texas explosion.  Within very seconds of learning of the explosions at the finish line in Boston on Monday I felt a rising up inside me.  It was fast and fierce and it was definitely pissed off.  I, like thousands of others, scrambled to gobble up good news about those I knew who were running or working or watching - but even that personal connection to real people was overshaddowed by a burning inside. 

I am on fire. 

I am a member of a marathon family, a group of people who are moved by sport - moved by the unmatched power & pride of bringing people together in this fundamentally public way for no other reason than for each to triumph and to overcome and to, well, to be together.  Every year for the past 7 (8?) years I stand in Fort Wadsworth at the very base of the Verrazano-Narrows bridge and feel my heart swell and my eyes overflow as the Howitzer blows and 40,000+ runners start the New York City Marathon.  They head across into Brooklyn and on to Central Park to meet both the personal and public challenge of completing this physical and mental race.  Every year I feel the collective electric community.  The coming together of countries and languages and faces and strangers - who each arrive with their own singular focus - but who each cross that bridge and pass through our city as a community, together, proud, and strong. 

They also do so without fear, without a thought in their minds that they might lose a limb, or a loved one.  Or at least they used to...

Things will never be the same at the base of the VZ bridge - the sound of that Howitzer will be haunting instead of celebratory, the cheers that rise from the crowds of runners and volunteers will not drown out the voice in the back of our minds - What if it happens again? Today? Here?

I am defiant.  Or is it belligerent?

For West, TX - I am briefly saddened, and then immediately aware and relieved that they will be in the good and strong hands of neighbors and friends and volunteers from around the country that will put them back together, good as new (collectively, I don't mean to at all diminish the loss of life and the holes those families will always feel).

For Boston and New York and London and Chicago and every other well-publicized race (for it was the publicity and the shock value that drove the insane, wasn't it?) -- I am defiant and angry and ready for battle.  We will not lie down, we will not cower and hide.  We will rise up, on fire, defiant and belligerent, and as a community of strangers - we will cross the finish line together, even if we are still, just a little, afraid.