When news of the Boston explosions hit the Internet, Facebook and Twitter flooded with comments like, “What is wrong with the world today?” (*)
The answer: Nothing. Nothing is wrong with the world today that wasn’t wrong yesterday and won’t be wrong tomorrow. Bad things happen to good people. Or, at least, random people. If you’re over the age of 20 and you still haven’t wrestled this truth to the ground, then you’re brain-damaged, lying, or you’ve lived an exceptionally sheltered life.
I know jack about what happened in Boston at this point. Maybe it was terrorism, foreign or domestic. Maybe it was something else. Maybe some guy was a shitty runner and decided to take it out on Boston. We’ll know more in the days and weeks to come. I saw videos of people running into danger to help other people, and I saw countless well wishes and prayers for the victims online. That’s what’s important to me.
A friend of mine noted that some of her friends have said they would never bring kids into “this world.” One wanted to apologize to her child for the state of the world.
Fuck that noise. This world is awesome.
This world is full of ice cream and sunshine and great wine and push-up bras. It’s also full of terrorism and rapists and dead babies and heart attacks. It’s always been that way and it will always be that way. I might wind up with a raft of things for which I’ll need to apologize to my daughter, but the state of the world I brought her into isn’t one of them. I suspect her life will be a mix of ice cream and terror (and, with my genes, probably the push-up bra), but that’s the price of admission. I’d rather teach her how to dodge and roll than how to get the vapors every time she boots up her computer.
Notes:
(*) I hesitate to say how terrible something like this is because duh, of course it is. Whoever purposely killed, injured and terrified people doing nothing more offensive than littering should be … well, should be arrested and tried before a jury of his peers. Even if he wasn’t born here. I’m a freak like that. I add it anyway, here in the notes, because people act like you ate a puppy if you don’t say the obvious about stuff like this. To the people of Boston and the runners and spectators from everywhere, my horror and sympathy are as sincere as anything I’ve ever experienced. (**)
(**) I say “he” because shitfaces like this are usually “he.” It’s not sexist. It’s statistically accurate. Women are generally shitfaces in other ways. If the shitface responsible for this has a vagina, I will retract.
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