Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Shock, Slightly Removed

Nothing makes a faraway tragedy real faster than discovering, quite unexpectedly, that the faces of the shocked victims in the news are familiar to you.

I'm used to looking at pictures of strangers in the news, whether or not the occasion is a tragic one--seeing only the emotions and not knowing who they are. As of yesterday morning, the Boston Marathon bombings have become an exception.

It's a shock to hear about any attack, of course. It's always shocking, no matter how often it happens (and it happens much too often now!), to open a news source or be contacted by a friend who is better-informed than I am and find that someone else has decided to kill people for no particular reason. But it's a different kind of shock to find a news article headed with a picture of some of my friends.

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