In ways both big and small, both fleeting and transformational, this time simply felt different.
On the lawn of the First Baptist Church in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, Eve Nagler stood at a prayer vigil two days after terrorists attempted to shred the joy of Boston’s biggest day with nails and BB’s and bits of hurtling metal.
This, she knew, was not 9/11 ”“ the scale, the shock, the fear were nothing like people had felt 12 years ago. Yet something else had shifted, too ”“ something perhaps less easily definable but no less palpable to many of those at the vigil and across the suburbs that bound themselves together as “Boston Strong.”
There was a calm, not only in the streets but in raw and wounded hearts.
They cowered in their homes hoping the swat uniformed police would find the bombers or allowed themselves to be forced outside at gunpoint so their homes could be searched. Both occurred when law enforcement demanded such without warrants or imposition of martial law. I thought it was creepy, not mature.
Creepy, perhaps, when one is confronted with an emergency situation (remember 9/11?), what else can one do? Do I think things got out of hand, and law enforcement overreacted? I don’t know, because I wasn’t there…..and neither, I suspect, were you.
Yes Creepy. Military style vehicles were cruising the streets and the entire city was on lock-down. Sounds like martial law to me. As per what else one can do … I think in my neighborhood I’d call a couple of other guys who live on the block and we’d clear the neighborhood ourselves. The people of Boston hid. And allowed SWAT garbed police to force them from their homes at gunpoint without warrants. I’m sure terrorists learned something from this. Next time bomb 8 city based events across the country and shut down major swaths of the US economy while getting citizens use to being locked in their homes.