Mendoza: In a sense, we also died in the bombing

NO one is glad, should be joyous, that no runner with Filipino blood running in his veins got hurt in the bombing of the Boston Marathon. That is downright counter flow, patently inimical to human relations. This is no time to celebrate. This is no time to wax euphoric. This is no time to indulge in self-praise. This is time to reflect. Once more. With feeling. More than the hurt absorbed by the relatives of the three who perished in the Boston bombings, we suffer more for the lethal blow against humanity. Such dastardly act was not just cowardly, it was not just designed to diminish us; it was executed to erase any genuine feeling of solidarity, peace and friendship among brothers and sisters involved not only in sports but in any human endeavor of global magnitude for that matter. Play it again, Sam. As time goes by, the world is continually struck with virtual nonsense. Seemingly, any thought now of sustained peace and goodwill among peoples is blurred—at least temporarily. In September 1972, 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were killed in an armed attack by Palestinian extremists of the Olympic Village in the Munich Olympiad. In September 2001, more than 3,000 people died when terrorists rammed a jet into the Twin Towers of New York in a catastrophe that changed the face of the world forever. No one is safe anymore. In the air on board a plane, you can now die not by the jet’s metal fatigue but by a madman’s mental fatigue. On land and by just merely watching runners crossing the finish line, you can now die as what happened to the three that were killed in the twin bombings in Boston, including an eight-year-old boy who had just hugged his father that had just breasted the tape. We mourn with their loved ones even as we had, in a sense, died a little, too. We commiserate with the 170-plus people who were injured, several of them losing their legs, even as we try to cope up with the anger seething in us—and will continue to—long after the frigging fact. The London Marathon is on deck within hours from now. God have mercy.