Watching the manhunt unfold on Twitter, I’m struck by the fact that I have nothing clever to say.
When I first heard that a policeman had been shot at MIT, there was no impulse to tie it to the marathon bombings. I thought these guys would be smarter, somehow, and that they would have left the city right now.
I keep coming back to that photo of Martin Richard, a little boy watching the marathon – one of the alleged bombers looming behind him.
These guys were kids themselves recently, is what I keep thinking. They most likely cried over scraped knees and took lunchboxes to school. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was born in 1993. He’s a 90s kid, for God’s sake.
I keep thinking that having a city on lockdown is normal and reasonable. No one is questioning that decision and I don’t question it myself. But background checks for weapons, though? Totally irrational and out-of-this-world.
As a P.S. to all of this – while everyone was watching Boston, a coffee shop bomb in Baghdad killed 27 people.
There’s nothing good to report. Days like this make me want to do nothing – just shut off the phone and sit on a park bench somewhere with Lev, and watch him chase pigeons around. It’s finally warm in Moscow, and he is wearing his new little keds.
Natalia A. 
@Natalia Antonova – “I thought these guys would be smarter …”
Apparently the Tsarnaev brothers were very unsophisticated ‘terrorists.’ They failed to plan for surveillance cameras at the Boston Marathon and had made no prior effort to disguise themselves when they placed the bombs at the Marathon. The Tsarnaevs apparently expected to escape detection and were taken off guard when the FBI released their photos at 5 PM EDT on Thursday. According to a criminologist at Northeastern University in the Boston area (interviewed by a news outlet), the Tsarnaevs’ lack of sophistication suggests that they were not connected to a terrorist network but instead operated as an isolated two-man team.
In a related news item, the Massachusetts State Police now says that the Tsarnaevs did NOT rob the 7-11 near MIT, but that someone else is responsible for that.
I hear you. Both of these young men were/are young enough to be my children. The older I get, the more likely I am to weep over the news.
I am also a native Bostonian. “Bostonians aren’t terrorized, we’re just wicked pissed!” (Lord knows I hear that, too….)