Making sense of the senseless Boston Marathon murders

(Illustration courtesy of Brian Lindstrom)

What happened yesterday was horrible. Explosions set off near the Boston Marathon killed several individuals and injured dozens of others. Much like the school shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary, this is the sort of incident that shakes you to the core. Massacres aren't supposed to happen in America. It's so senseless, so malicious, so... inhuman. It's the thing you think is never going to happen, because to believe it can happen is to go through life being cynical and paranoid. And yet here it was, one of those increasingly common incidents that make it all to clear that there are some horrible, horrible people out there.

I thought of two things today, beyond feeling the utmost sympathy for the people who were affected by this tragedy. One: the Boston Marathon will never be the same. From now until the end of time, the event will be jam-packed with security officers. An increased screening process will make it harder for people to enter; maybe there'll even be officers monitoring every step of the race -- if that isn't done already. And all of that will be necessary to prevent further massacres, but it doesn't resolve the horrible reality that these safeguards need to be put in place at all. The Boston Marathon is just supposed to be a friendly exhibition between runners; now it's a political stage, and the memory of what happened yesterday will haunt it for the rest of time.

It's akin to what happened to Monica Seles, who was poised to become the greatest female tennis player of her generation when, in 1993, a crazed fan walked onto the court and stabbed her with a knife. "Like 9/11 changed the world, the Monica Seles incident changed tennis,'' a man named Micky Lawler said in a 2008 ESPN article. "Once everyone had the opportunity to step back and take a breath, things had to happen. Tournaments had to expect much stricter and a higher standard of security. There was an overhaul on the way security was done.'' There has not been a prominent fan-player incident in tennis since Seles' -- which will have its 20th anniversary in exactly two weeks. The safeguards are effective, or if they're not effective, they at least give the appearance that they are and allow peace of mind at a tennis game.

And yet, we can't celebrate those safeguards because we understand, deep down, that our society shouldn't be so flawed that these accommodations need to exist. We shouldn't have to safeguard innocuous events like marathons and tennis matches from homicidal maniacs. We shouldn't need to make little kids step through metal detectors before they go to school. In a perfect world, we wouldn't have to rearrange our lives in the fear of what a crazy person might do. There wouldn't be talk about arming teachers, and tennis matches and marathons wouldn't need to be closely monitored by security guards.

What happened yesterday was a reminder -- a horrible, horrible reminder -- that bad people are out there, and they can do bad things to anyone at anytime, and that we really do need to account for them -- as awful as that is.

The other equally-somber thought I had was that of all the days this massacre could have occurred on, it happened to fall on Jackie Robinson Day. The reason we celebrate Robinson's major league debut is that he unified a sport that should have never been divided in the first place. His sacrifices helped eliminate the senseless racism and bigotry that existed in not only baseball, but in all sports. And what better way to honor his courage in paving the way for sports equality than to have all major leaguers -- white and black -- wear his No. 42.

And yet for all that's been done to drive racism out of the United States, for all that Robinson accomplished, there are still irrational people out there. As civilized and advanced as we are, we're still waging wars with madmen who are looking to harm others. And no one, not Jackie Robinson or Gandhi or anyone, can change that.