Acts of kindness in response to Boston Marathon bombings
Posted April 16, 2013 7:15 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
BOSTON (NEWS1130) – Out of the carnage came compassion.
Many people have responded to the tragedy in Boston with simple acts of kindness — from strangers wandering the sidewalks offering shelter, a shower or even just a jug of orange juice to Google creating a person-finder to help reconnect loved ones and a public spreadsheet of Bostonians opening up their homes.
Marathoners offered each other jackets to keep warm as emergency crews worked feverishly to deal with the wounded and dead.
“Even in heartbreak there is good in people,” tweeted one woman.
Another man tweeted, “For all the horror today, what I saw after the explosions was a city of compassion and caring, of people wanting to help. The real Boston.”
In New York, there was a three-storey projection on the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the message reading, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that,” and New York “hearts” Boston.
Comedian and actor Patton Oswalt has a reminder that the good people in the world outnumber the bad; on his Facebook page he writes, “If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people [responsible for the bombing], that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out.”
“So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, ‘The good outnumber you, and we always will,” he continues.
It’s a point illustrated by the number of people who had just given everything they had, running 42 kilometres and then ran to Massachusetts General Hospital to give blood.
