More comments on Boston

 So there was this stupid article on Alternet Boston a taste of a police state
I am getting really tired of articles like this, and once again I had to give a long most likely ignored response. Which I want to remember so I am posting it here.
Wow quite the long article there, lots and lots of points, some good, some bad, some so far out in left field the Green Monster can't be held responsible for what happens.

Let me make one point right away. What is happening in Chicago, and in our own Roxbury is terribly sad, young men who don't think they have any value, or much of a future are killing each other for a small payout, or a bit of respect. It is horrible, but it is not the same thing as the bombing victims. In Roxbury, and I bet in Chicago and any other area subject to gang violence the community turns a blind eye to finding the people who do the shooting.

Do you know much about the Boston area? Do you know our politics? Or our history? This is a city that knows martial law, and the pain of innocents, we remember the first Boston Massacre. None of us living today experienced it, but it is a part and parcel of our DNA,

Yes lots of crazy people used the bombing as a way to pump up their own nut job agenda, on both sides of the discussion. Reminding us once again of the crazy comments made after the bombing is meaningless. The comments were stupid, the speakers more so. Although I still can't get Iman Webb's comment about wanting to wrap Boston in a blanket and smother it out of my head. A poor choice of words, hopefully not want he meant to say the two different times he said it.

Now to the suspects, who were the unknown. We knew what they looked like thanks to the brave people who described them to police from their hospital beds. We knew they knew we were after them when their faces were shown by the police. After that happened we also know that some friends helped then hide evidence, while others called the police to give them their names. We then discovered they were willing to murder a police officer, to car jack an innocent man and threaten him with death. They bragged how they were the bombers and loaded pipe bombs in to his car. He bravely escaped and let the police know what happened to him. Would any of us have been that brave to do the same thing?

He did not know if there were just two people he did not know the number of pipe bombs loaded into his car, or the sum total in both vehicles. The police had no choice but to expect the worse. They did not know if the second suspect ran to a safe house, or ran in panic after killing his own brother. We did not know if there were other people involved or if his was on his own. We knew he was someone who had no problem with killing, the police knew they did not want to give him another chance to add to the body count.

So the people of Boston, the people of the Greater Boston area were asked to remove themselves from the equation. To make sure the bombers were the only ones on the chessboard. We did something that few people appear to understand, we got out of the way. When your neighbors house is on fire do you grab a garden hose and put it out your self or do you stand back and let the professionals do their jobs? During a blizzard, who clears your street, you with a snow blower or the city with a snow plow? When a person who has already shown a willingness to kill do you run outside with a gun to look for him your self, or do you let the police do their job? Remember Officer Dorner, the innocent people shot by the LA police? That did not happen here, it did not happen because we did what any civilized people would do, we got out of the way and let the professionals do their job.

I dread to think what could have happened, I am beyond happy that it did not. I'm also very tired of the second guessing, the idea that tragedy is a competition to be won.