The People Who Ran Towards The Blast

A number of people talking about the attacks at the Boston Marathon have praised the people who ran towards the blast to help victims.  Not enough can be said about the police, the emergency medical technicians, nurses from the medical tents, doctors and nurses and others, even some who had been in the race, who went immediately to apply tourniquets and try to save people who were bleeding to death, suffered traumatic amputations, inhaled burning air, and who probably knew they were running into possible danger if not death.  Terrorists are known to explode bombs meant to kill those who come to aid their first set of victims.

No amount of praise is sufficient, every word said in that regard can not begin to match the merit of their actions. 

In Boston it is particularly worth remembering the mockery and snark aimed at these same heroic people, especially from media scribblers and bloggers sitting safely at their computer screens over the "Lite Brite" incident.  That was the one when two idiotic "artists" working for money put unexplained lighted displays of an ephemeral and stupid cable TV cartoon in places such as bridges.  The first responders took calls from the public and took them as possible bombs and treated them as seriously as they would have these bombs if they had been reported.   How, so many a media or blog commentator asked, couldn't they have known this was a publicity stunt for "Aqua Teen"?  As if serious people have nothing better to do than to keep up with the latest bit of lowest grade trash "culture" the cable TV industry can put out to entertain the notably unserious,  self-congratulatory, "reality community".

Following close on was an MIT student who was arrested at gun point for walking around Logan Airport with a lighted circuit board on her, causing a much snarked about incident in which she was treated as a possible terrorist.  Logan is the airport from which two of the the 9-11 attacks were launched.  In that case the idiot from MIT was doing an "art project".  That was the occasion for a new round of snark, this one joined in by many computer geeks who wondered how the police and security couldn't have recognized it as an innocuous ornament.

The least we can do is to assume that people trained as first responders know more than people who haven't been, who have little chance of being called on or to volunteer to put themselves in danger to save people.   Sometimes life isn't entertainment, sometimes it is serious.  Sometimes the command to "lighten up" should be met with one to shut up.  Quite often, actually.