I grew up on the outskirts of Boston, taking the T into town for music lessons and ball games, learning from a young age the ins and outs of the city’s many diverse neighborhoods and streets.
My parents aren’t from the area, so as a kid I sometimes felt like less of a Bostonian than my friends, whose extended families seemed to own certain areas of town.
But nevertheless, I, along with my family, came to love the many traditions that make Boston the special place that it is.
At Red Sox games, you can find me belting the words to “Sweet Caroline” louder than anyone else in the bleacher seats. On the Fourth of July, I watch fireworks at the Hatch Shell on the Charles River Esplanade.
On New Year’s Eve,
I celebrate First Night in Copley Square.
And on Patriot’s Day in April each year, I delight in the thrill of being downtown for Marathon Monday, watching the way that runners walk proudly through the city streets, draped in shiny heat sheets with medals around their necks.
Despite my love for my hometown, I decided to attend college in Pennsylvania, and in fall 2009, I enrolled at Dickinson College in Carlisle. My time at Dickinson has allowed me to explore the world and gain a global perspective through a liberal arts curriculum and an academic year studying abroad.
At Dickinson, my political science major introduced me to concepts surrounding global terrorism and anti-American beliefs. In my classes, I’ve learned to analyze acts of violence and war through a lens different from the one I had as a high school student in Boston.
I was at Dickinson for most of the major news events of the past four years. I remember following Twitter from an alcove in the library during the occupation of Tahrir Square in Egypt in February 2011. I was the one who turned on the TV in the student center to watch President Obama announce the death of Osama bin Laden later that spring. This winter, I mourned with friends across campus after the tragic shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
And while acts of violence are never easy to understand, my studies have helped me look at terrorism from different perspectives, and to understand (without accepting) the motivations behind violence in various parts of the world.
Like most other students of my generation, I am used to bloody images of war zones in the Middle East. I have grown up with the War on Terror, and have watched the violent destruction of communities far from home.
But on Monday, watching the news at Dickinson didn’t feel the same way that it does when the background is some unfamiliar place in a land far away.
When I checked to see who had won the race, I found a scene of complete turmoil. In the place of strangers congratulating every runner they saw, strangers were tying tourniquets to people’s amputated bodies.
There’s an element of shock involved in seeing your hometown in a way you’ve never seen it before, especially on a day that is usually so full of joy.
When the Twin Towers were attacked in 2001, New York was devastated by the emotional and physical destruction of its community. And while those flights left from Boston, our community did not feel the attacks in the same way New Yorkers did.
Home, for Bostonians, is a place that has gone, for the most part, untouched by this sort of violence.
So to hear that my city was on lockdown, that SWAT teams were running down the same streets that I walk, that my neighborhood was deserted and my friends and family members were locked indoors, was more surreal than anything else.
Looking at pictures of the empty streets, I’m reminded of scenes from a post-apocalyptic movie, and I have failed to fully grasp the idea that those streets are that same ones that constitute my city and my home.
It is my instinct as a Dickinson student who experiences a “global education” to look at the bombings in Boston from a similar viewpoint that I look at any other violent act in my classes.
But for now, it’s too soon for me to try put any sense into what has occurred. The feelings of fear, sadness, and most surprisingly for me, anger, are too overwhelming to think about the attacks in any kind of logical way.
I, like many other Bostonians living away from home, am grappling with confusion between a desire to be there and a thankfulness that I’m so far away.
What I’ve learned from this, more than anything else, is that it’s easy for me to calmly analyze violence that doesn’t affect me personally. It’s simple to write a paper on war in Syria or revolution in Egypt, because I’m not feeling the impact it is having in the same way that I would if I had grown up there.
For some, violence comparable to what Boston has experienced this week is part of everyday life. For me, the feeling is luckily still entirely unfamiliar.
Last year, I spent nine months studying in two different countries in Africa, but today, in Carlisle, my distance from Boston has never felt so huge.