By Emily Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief
Boom!
April 15, 2013. I remember it like it was yesterday. I could be sitting in that car right now.
I was 10 years old, and my father had just picked me up from school. It was a sunny spring afternoon, and we were on the main highway driving home when his phone started ringing. His colleague from the hospital that he works at was on the other line. My stomach dropped when I heard what she told him.
My father pulled our car into the parking lot of a playground, and that’s when I heard her say there had been a bombing at the Boston Marathon, 10 minutes from where we were at that very moment. We were both in shock. The confusion and panic, not knowing if there were more bombs planted and where, left the entire city in fright. My dad instantly volunteered to go assist in the emergency room.
I remember the drive home that day. I was hidden under a blanket in the backseat of my dad’s car, shaking; the perpetrators of the bombing were still at large in the very streets that led us home. Once we got back, I did not leave my house for almost an entire week.
News reports showed videos of the scene of the bombing and began speculating who could have carried out the attack. Anchors started listing the names of towns; I knew them all. Not just by name, but in memory. The town where one of the bombers was arrested after a dayslong manhunt is a mere 15 minutes from my house; my friends and I used to play on its streets when we were little.
For four days, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsrnaev, the brothers who planted the bombs, walked those very roads I grew up on. They hijacked an innocent man’s car and kidnapped him, killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police officer and had a standoff with police, shooting bullets and throwing bombs in the middle of a quiet town not that far from where I live.
While watching the news, I recognized where the bombing took place. I have memories of marathon runners speeding by on it a few years earlier. I knew the hospitals where the injured were being treated; I walked their halls with my parents when I was little and went with them to work. The houses in all the pictures looked just like my own; I know the families who live in them. My childhood took place in the shops and landscapes that appeared in the background of every photo and video broadcast on the news that week.
When the Jewish community talks about terrorism, most often we are talking about Israel. Except for 9/11, a day which my peers have no memory of, we never really acknowledge that terrorism exists in America too.
April 15, 2013 was the day that I learned and lived that truth. I was only 10, but I saw what pure evil looks like, because it infiltrated my own home. And I still bear the burden of those memories. Of what that deadly attack did to my community.
Three beautiful souls gone too soon. 281 people injured, their lives changed forever. An entire city ripped to shreds, its soul crushed by devastation and destruction. Yet, in the face of all that evil, I witnessed my community overcome one of the most unimaginable horrors possible, with strength.
Having grown up in Boston, I am an ardent Red Sox fan (sorry to all you Yankee-loving New Yorkers). A few days after the Boston bombing, David Ortiz, a well-known Red Sox player, got on the mound of a stadium every Bostonian knows intimately, and spoke to the crowd.
Players that day donned jerseys that read “Boston” instead of “Red Sox,” and so he wasn’t just speaking to the people in the stadium, but to the entire city. After thanking all the emergency personnel who responded to the bombing that dreadful day, Ortiz said one sentence. A sentence that Boston has lived by ever since.
“This is our f*cking city, and nobody gonna dictate our freedom.”
The sound and image of bombs exploding at the marathon 12 years ago haunts so many who live in Boston, but we won’t let that dictate our liberty. Despite the pain, we move forward, because we refuse to let terrorism win. That’s what it means to embody strength: finding the inner will to live proudly in the face of evil, even when it tries to destroy you. Being strong means finding the courage to withstand anything no matter how hard it might be, and that’s exactly what I witnessed Boston do.
When I walk the streets of Boston today, I see a city that flourishes despite the pain of its past. Victims still endur Dzhokhar Tsrnaev’s yearslong legal proceedings and at the trial gave powerful testimonies of that tragic day to his eyes. They have pushed through long and hard medical recoveries with rigor. Runners who were injured in the bombing ran the race again years later, crossing that finish line with pride.
It is these strong individuals that I have the fortune of sharing a home with. I learn from them every day; I look up to them in awe and yearn to embody even just an ounce of their resilience. They have taught me that a home is built by the people in our community, out of the bricks of our strength, in a place we come to know intimately.
I have recollections of terrorism in my own home, but I will not allow them to overshadow all of the good I know exists deep within its heart.
12 years later this city is still ours. Nobody can take it away from us.
Boston Strong.
Photo Caption: The day after the Boston Marathon bombing
Photo Credit: Eric Haynes / Governor’s Press Office