Yesterday, two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon. Reports say three were killed but we still do not know many details. My hands shake and tears form as I think back to six years ago when Seung-Hui Cho went on a shooting spree at Virginia Tech and killed 32 students. My brother was there that day and I remember the fear of not being able to reach his cell. When the cell networks in Boston went down, I felt for the families who could not reach their friends and family members. Not knowing if loved ones are alright is the worst part of any tragedy. Media coverage is going to focus on these bombings for the next few weeks and then will go back to their regular programming.
Despite this national tragedy, we cannot be ignorant to tragedies abroad. Yesterday, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Pakistan and Iran. In Mogadishu, Somalia, the terrorist group al-Shabab set off a series of bombings on Sunday that killed many public officials. In Iraq yesterday, dozens were killed in a recent wave of bombings. Warplanes from the Syrian government killed at least 30 children yesterday in an attack. Major networks such as CNN or Fox give little to no media attention to these events.
Fifty years ago today, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” King wrote, "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly." The lives of all humans are sacred, from Boston to Damascus, Blacksburg to Mogadishu and Sandy Hook to Baghdad.
We should counter such acts of terror not with force, but with love for our fellow humans; violence only breeds more violence and it falls on us to break the cycle. Forty-one years ago today, our nation successfully launched the Apollo 16 mission to the moon, a mission not fueled by hate, but by the innate love of progress. Likewise, King went to jail not out of hate, but out of love. Turning the other cheek is not an act of weakness; rather, it is the bravest path any human can take.