If the past 72 hours have revealed anything, it is that America can dish it out but we can't take it. Why, just 9 days before the Boston Marathon bombing that killed 3, a U.S.\NATO airstrike in Afghanistan killed 17, including 12 terrorists disguised as children. One heard nary a peep about this war crime in the mainstream media. Even after the death of 8-year-old Martin Richard at the Boston Marathon, I have yet to find a single mainstream media source reporting on the 12 Afghan children killed in that single airstrike.
The rest of the world must look at us and shake its head. We dish out pain, death and suffering on a massive scale to the third world on a quasi-daily basis. But let even one tiny little taste of that destruction we so casually and cruelly hand out to others land upon our shores and, oh, the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments that ensues.
I love Boston - I was born there in 1959. I have traveled there a couple times as as adult and each time have found myself loving the city and its people and culture of learning and quiet elegance. I feel a deep sorrow for the victims of the Marathon bomber. But I also know that America has incurred an enormous karmic debt, one that history, human experience and the cosmos insist must be paid by the blood of our innocents who are no more or less innocent than those 12 Afghan children killed so suddenly and without warning a week prior.
R.I.P Bostonians. R.I.P Afghans - you shall all be missed and never forgotten.
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