‘If you are losing faith in human nature, go out and watch a marathon’
Posted by Ezra Klein on April 15, 2013 at 7:11 pm
My wife has been training for a marathon. She leaves the house early in the morning and runs for hours and hours. She comes home tired and sore. And then she does it again. And again. And again.
There’s no reason for her to do it. There’s no competition or payoff or award. It’s just a quiet, solitary triumph over the idea that she couldn’t do it, and it all happens before I even wake up.
In recent months, runner’s magazines have begun appearing on our coffee table. One includes an article from Tish Hamilton. “The Boston Marathon,” she writes. “Even the nonfaithful know that it is the holy-grail accomplishment, the one that marks a runner as ‘serious.’”
The finish line at a marathon is a small marvel of fellowship. Everyone is there to celebrate how much stronger the runners are than they ever thought they could be. Total strangers line up alongside the route to yell encouragement. Bands play. Some hand out cups of water, Gatorade, even beer. Others dress up in costumes to make the runners smile. The fact that other people can run this far makes us believe we can run that far. It’s a happy thought. It makes us all feel a little bit stronger.
Today, the final line of the Boston Marathon is a crime scene. It’s a testament to how much more evil human beings can be than we can imagine. The bomb — or at least what we think was a bomb — went off at four hours and nine minutes. As Pacific Standard notes, that’s a popular marathon time. It seems likely that the detonation was timed to kill as many people as possible.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/15/if-you-are-losing-faith-in-human-nature-go-out-and-watch-a-marathon/
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