Jarbidge to the Oregon Trail

I woke up this morning to the news that the identities of the two men suspected of being the Boston Marathon bombers had been identified, and, further, that one of them was already dead, killed in a shoot-out with Boston police. It wasn’t really that simple, but the initial reports made it sound that simple.

I got sucked into the play-by-play of the story because the radio station I listen to for traffic updates during my commute happened to be also running the play-by-play of the hunt for the remaining fugitive. It was bizarre, in an O.J. Simpson police chase sort of way. My mind began to see the whole thing as something of a real-life Bruce Willis “Die Hard” movie, an impression that was solidified by some Boston reporters who started tossing back and forth the titles of Tom Petty Songs that seemed to fit the moment and then followed that up with a reference to a movie.

At work, I kept CNN up on the Internet so I could follow the news.

Honestly, I am not such a news junkie, but there was just something about this story that kept sucking me into it. Maybe it was the humanity of Boston, or the circus of media following the police around (the only moving people in Boston today: the FBI, National Guard, Police, and news crews with satellite dishes on their vans). I cannot honestly tell you why it was so fascinating.

Maybe it was the uncle of the suspects as he stood before cameras and microphones and publicly denounced the behavior of his nephews. I felt for him. I understood his anguish. I wanted to tell him that America understands (but I know there are people who will still target his family and ethnicity in some deranged sense of seeking justice). I understood that he watched the news unfold, saw his nephews throwing grenades and explosives at police and realized they were not being framed, but this was real and he was related to psychos. (The father of the boys did not elicit such sympathy from me as he declared with blind parental love that his sons had been “framed”. Right.)

The situation had not (yet) resolved itself when I got into my car at 5PM and I discovered that any traffic problems Portland, Oregon was having did not warrant any reporting: the radio station never broke for a traffic update, but followed the Boston siege (it was a siege by then) entirely. It would have been nice to know what traffic was doing, but I found myself sucked into the blow-by-blow of a nineteen year old holed up in someone’s parked boat in a driveway.

I was rooting for the nineteen-year-old to live. To survive. So young. Like the officials, I want answers: did they act alone or did someone put them up to this? Why Chechen insurgents? It’s kind of a thin and bizarre line.

It was with some relief that the last radio news was that the nineteen year old had been taken, alive.

So I came into the house and tuned into the television where I watched the ambulance head out to whatever hospital in Boston with the wounded young man. And I watched as the police, FBI and others left the scene – to a standing ovation by the citizens of Boston.

A Standing Ovation.

I do not pretend to know how this will play out. I’m not pretending to guess at motives or even conspiracy theories. It doesn’t matter. All I really want to convey is the standing ovation: how citizens of Boston and of the neighborhoods that were searched and held under siege and who – supposedly – were put into a tail-spin of terror did not succumb to that terror, but who also stood up and cheered and clapped when Boston’s Finest wrapped it all up.

I don’t know the whole story yet. But I want to tell Boston’s Finest that I am cheering for them and I appreciate everything they did today, including trying so hard to take the young man alive so he could answer their questions. I think if this was a “conspiracy” issue, they would have killed the last known witness to that conspiracy, but they didn’t. They brought him in alive.

Thank you, Boston.

(And I am humbly open to being proven wrong if there really is a conspiracy theory that can be proven.)