Boston Strong
Residents call it Marathon Monday or Patriot’s Day, and it’s a day like no other. Held annually on the third Monday in April, the Boston Marathon (the oldest in the country) is “the best marathon in the world,” Billy Evans, superintendent of the Boston Police Department, said years later with vibrant confidence. “It’s like the Rite of Spring. It’s right around Easter, the city’s coming alive, the flowers are blooming.”
On Monday, April 15, 2013, runners worldwide undertook the 26.2-mile-long trek to the finish line, cheered on by enthusiastic locals. “There’s no finer people to me in the world [than Bostonians]” Evans recalled, who was in the first wave. “Everyone was happy. It couldn’t have been a more picture-perfect day.”
Five hours into the race, runners made the final stretch to the finish line. “I just love the atmosphere,” Janell Jimenez, a Boston EMT, recalled. “I love the cheering that goes on.” For some, it was less about winning than participating, less about accolades than about community.
But the positive atmosphere was not to define that day. At 2:49 p.m., two pressure cooker bombs, placed 600 feet apart, exploded within seconds of each other on the sidewalk, sending shrapnel in all directions. “There was a flash of glass and smoke,” a survivor recalled. Another eyewitness remembered looking up for airplanes, an instinct instilled by the trauma of September 11, 2001. Screams of horror replaced cheers of joy.
The first reported victim was eight-year-old Martin Richard, whose final moments were spent eating ice cream and cheering on strangers and family friends. Others—some right next to the blasts—fell to the ground, mangled by the torrent of metal bits, nails, and ball bearings. Three died and more than 260 others were injured. Some, like young Richard’s six-year-old sister, lost limbs, a tragic mark of what was said to be the realization of the unimaginable, the occurrence of the impossible.
Shaken, injured, confused, and overcome with fear and grief, many cried, others ran, some stood frozen in shock, and one woman fell to her knees in fervent, tear-ridden prayer. Expecting that further attacks would come, Jiminez called her boyfriend, saying, “I love you.”
A trauma surgeon who had just finished a 28-hour shift at Boston Medical hurried back to help the injured. “You can’t put into words how disturbing this is,” she said, describing injuries and amputations that resembled reports from war. “We just completed what the bomb had done,” said the chief of trauma surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Amidst the disorienting fog of inexplicable events, the boundary separating the necessary and the discriminatory grows exceedingly thin. And April 2013 was no different. Still reeling from the tragic memories of September 11, some Americans couldn’t resist the pull of their worst instincts.
Early on, it was rumored that a 20-year-old Saudi national was the perpetrator, and commentators with a flair for the dramatic stoked the fires of anger still smoldering in the country. However, authorities cleared the student; some still insisted he was involved. “He’s the money man,” Glenn Beck said.
Three days after the attacks, on Thursday, April 18, after thorough research, law enforcement released the photos of two suspects, known as “white hat, black hat,” or suspects one and two. They were later identified as two Chechen brothers who were Islamic extremists angered by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Such information gave ammunition to the fear-mongering sort. One congressman immediately suggested that “we need to begin profiling who our enemy is in this war: young Muslim men,” and several news outlets ran away with such rhetoric.
At noon at the Cathedral of The Holy Cross in Boston on April 18, President Barack Obama urged Americans to rise above the instinct to seek vengeance on groups rather than serving justice on the perpetrators. “In the face of evil, Americans will lift up what’s good,” he said. “In the face of cruelty, we will choose compassion.”
Of the terrorists, the president said, “we will find you,” adding, “our fidelity to our way of life—to our free and open society—will only grow stronger. Our faith in each other, our love for each other, our love for country, our common creed that cuts across whatever superficial differences there may be—that is our power. That’s our strength.”
The brothers “sought to intimidate us, to terrorize us, to shake us from those values that make us who we are as Americans,” Obama said. “They picked the wrong city to do it. Not here in Boston.” Applause thundered throughout the cathedral. “This time next year, on the third Monday in April, the world will return to this great American city to run harder than ever, and to cheer even louder, for the 118th Boston Marathon. Bet on it.”
Evans thought the speech was “very powerful,” reminding the nation of the power of togetherness. “The city needed that,” Edward Davis, Boston’s police commissioner, recalled.
The next day, the younger terrorist was captured (the eldest had died in a shootout with police the night before). Relief swept through Massachusetts and the nation. Gathered in the streets, a group of female college students sang, “God bless America, my home sweet home.” Others cheered and waved American flags.
The nightmare had ended, and the country, shaken to its core, had nevertheless held the line and lifted up the best of itself: the sacrifice, the selflessness, the courage, the hope. “Boston Strong” became a rallying cry, symbolizing not just the resilient spirit of Boston but the strength of the American ethos.
Whether in Boston or elsewhere, Americans chose to follow the path John Lewis implored the year before. “Release the need to hate, to harbor division, and the enticement of revenge,” he wrote in 2012. “Hold only love, only peace in your heart, knowing that the battle of good to overcome evil is already won.”