It may be a slight fever brought on by an emerging cold—I have a sore throat and congestion as well—or it may be that it’s real. Which is to say that everything feels a bit surreal, today.
Consider it—we shut down the largest metropolitan area in New England yesterday. We poured nine thousand cops into Watertown, Massachusetts. The schools closed, businesses closed, the transit system closed, two sports events and the Boston symphony concert were cancelled.
All of this for a 19-year old kid?
Right—it might be the years of Wal-Mart bleeding through, but my first thought was how much was this gonna cost? Second was—get ready. Do you really think that it’s going to be long before the next nineteen-year old kid swipes his mother’s pressure cooker? I mean, who wouldn’t want, in their teens, to be sufficiently the source of attention that Obama cancels his day and holes up in the situation room with his cabinet?
Oh, and guess who found the guy? A guy just outside the search area who finally could leave his house and saw blood on his boat. So he peered in, and there was Dzhokhar. Right—so did Dzhokhar shoot? At the police, yes; at the neighbor, no.
Nor did the two brothers harm the owner of the Mercedes SUV which they had carjacked. And really, it may be time to grow up, sigh heavily, and learn to do what the British did for all those years when the IRA was bombing the city.
Scoop up the bodies, cart away the debris, wash down the sidewalk—as quickly as you can.
Oh, and then there’s the other tragedy that got completely displaced by our fascination with a 19-year kid. Susan said it best:
Poor Texas, its explosion entirely (well, mostly) eclipsed by the apocalyptic search for two young adults in Boston. But then the bad guys in Texas are much less dangerous: a corporation, lobbyists, regulators, the state government. And there were fewer deaths and injuries -- oh, wait . . .
Love that mordant tone! And it appears Susan is bang on—I read an op-ed piece in the New York Times about Texas’s famous antagonism to regulation. In fact, the attorney general for the state described his day as something like this (of course I can’t find the article now): I wake up in the morning, drive to the office, spend all day suing Obama, and then come home again.
Oh.
Then there’s the story about the Suicide Prevention in Gun Shops program. Well, that was clearly up an alley I had to sojourn, so I checked it out. And half of the gun shops are now distributing suicide prevention materials. That makes sense, in a sense, since guns are the most common form of suicide—accounting for more deaths than all other methods.
Well, well—an interesting notion. And are we going to put smoking cessation materials in tobacco shops, and diabetes prevention material in candy shops?
Oh, and speaking about guns, what about the woman who sat down in a hotel lobby next to the Twin Towers Museum, and felt something hard beneath her? It was Monday, just as the bombs were going off in Boston, and thus she was doubly alarmed to find that the hard object under her tush was a gun. Sensibly, she gave it to the front desk, which sensibly locked it up and notified the cops. Since the emergency response team happened to be meeting at the time, the news went straight to the top.
Well, they were in a bit of a swivet, as someone might say—was there a relationship between the bombs in Boston and the gun in the lobby of a hotel next to the World Trade Center?
Nope—it turned out that one of the guests had gone to see the museum, seen the metal detector, asked if he could enter with his weapon, was told absolutely not, and then return to the hotel, where he put the gun, not sensibly…
Do I have to tell you?
Perhaps this cold has warped whatever shreds I have for the talent of critical thinking, because the only thing that made sense, today, was the daffodils that are blooming absolutely everywhere in New York City.
They first showed up in the spring of 2002, after having been planted by volunteers in the fall of 2001, which had one particularly lousy day for the city of New York. So the Dutch got it into their heads to give a little gift to the city of New York, and they sent over a gazillion daffodil bulbs.
I love, I just love, stuff like this. It’s on a par with dear Queen Victoria sending over 15,000 books (number invented, but it was a lot) to Chicago after the great fire, to replace those lost from the library. Which of course Chicago had never had—so they had to run out and build one, quick.
Those broad-shouldered boys thought big, and they produced a masterpiece. Even has a Tiffany dome—take a look.
OK—I’m at three pages, 871 words, and one great photo.
Now can I go to bed?
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