Praying for Boston

So, I had a pretty solid post set up recapping this weekend. I was going to talk about the Devils' continued slide (lost AGAIN tonight), the Yankees actually doing well, the Formula 1 race from China, the great playoff in the Masters, and I was even going to talk about Kobe Bryant's Achilles injury. The problem is, none of that matters right now...

The day of the Boston Marathon is always a great day for the city of Boston. The day was set up perfectly; the Red Sox play a matinee at Fenway, the Marathon ends in the early evening, and the Bruins take on their division-rival Ottawa Senators at the TD Garden. What a day for a city, right? Well, things went all wrong at about the four-hour and nineteen-minute mark of the race. Two explosions rock the city right at the finish line of the marathon. The scene looked like something out of war movie, yet it was in the middle of Boston.

Now, I was out running errands when this all first went down. I got home an hour after the explosions, and I walk in my house only to see my mom with that "Something bad just happened in America" face with NBC on the TV. I sat down and took it all in. I, like most people watching around the country and world, could not believe what I was seeing; blood on the sidewalks, people laying in heaps and being taken away on stretchers, buildings damaged, shrapnel flying. And to think this was in BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS. This wasn't war-torn Africa, this wasn't an Arab nation in uprising, this wasn't a scene out of a former Soviet Socialist Republic, this was one of the cities responsible for the birth of the United States. That's what makes this so hard to digest.

At last check, the casualty figures are at 144 injured and three dead. That is mind-boggling! The Boston Marathon is such a benign event. It's a showcase of the greatest endurance runners in the world that's a huge spectacle for the city. I don't understand how something like this can happen at an event like this. Why? That's all I can keep asking myself. There isn't a sufficient answer as to why. So, in less than a year's time, we've seen a movie theater shot up in Aurora, Colorado, Sandy Hook Elementary School shot up in Newtown, Connecticut, and now the Boston Marathon got blown up. What is going on with the world we live in? The fact there are people out there that are willing to carry out these tragedies scares the crap out of me because I could end up as another statistic at any point. It's something you can't get away from. It can happen to ANYONE, and that's a very sobering thought. That being said, I'm going to continue to go to sporting events because it's something I love to do. A handful of psychopaths isn't going to stop me.

This is a sick world we live in with sick people. Please continue send your thoughts and prayers to the city of Boston and to the victims and their families.