Day 258. Egos Aside

Want to know how powerful the spirit of collaboration can be?  Look no further than Boston, this past week.  Everyone co-operated.  Everyone was on the same page.  They worked as a team.

From the Governor to the Mayor.  From the local police to the FBI.  From the swat teams, to the military, to the bomb squads, to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives.  From the emergency workers to the medical personnel to the fire fighters.  From the runners to the residents to the business owners.

I wasn’t there.  I have no training in such matters.  Or, thankfully, any experience.  But this I do know.  If they hadn’t put their egos aside, if they hadn’t put individual agendas or prejudices or beliefs or preferences aside, if

Day 257. Real Heroes

I am going to be uncharacteristically brief in today’s post. There’s no need for me to go on and on. There’s just one point I want to make. I have to admit I love the irony.

Yesterday morning I wrote about the extremes we go to, when it comes to celebrities. How we idolize them, put them on pedestals and treat them like heroes. Actually, we don’t just treat them like heroes. I think we believe they are heroes. Misguided as it is.

But little did I know, by last night, we’d be seeing real heroes in action. When teams representing local, state and federal law enforcement caught and captured Dzhokar Tsarmaev, one of the suspects believed to

Day 255. Stop Already!!!

When will the news media learn their lesson? What will it take? What has to happen? How many mistakes do they have to make? How many faces have to turn red? How much crow must be eaten? How many heads have to hang, in shame? How many slaps on the wrist do they need? How many reprimands?

There I was, minding my own business, having lunch. Eating and scrolling through Facebook to see what my friends were up to. Suddenly BuzzFeed reported a suspect in the Boston bombing had been arrested.

Yeah, I put the TV on. CNN. There they were. John King, Christopher Cuomo and Anderson Cooper. Joining them was Juliette Kayyem, the former homeland security advisor to Massachusetts Governor, Deval Patrick.

They were tripping over themselves to break the story. Insisting they had spoken to “very senior, very credible sources”, they announced two separate videos showed the same suspect dropping the bag containing at least one of the bombs; and then running away from the scene as soon as the blasts went off. The accompanying video coverage went so far as to circle the image of the guy, just in case viewers couldn’t figure out who he was

Day 254. Not Again.

What is there left to be said about the bombings in Boston?  Nothing.  Not really.  But still, we all feel the need to say something.  To try to express how we feel.  The words don’t come easy.

I was shooting a video for a client when I heard the news.  The videographer’s partner texted him.  We just stared at each other in stunned disbelief.  And resignation because, tragically, we’ve become all too used to this.

So I did what hundreds of thousands of other men and women were, no doubt, doing.  I immediately reached for my iPhone and googled ‘Boston Marathon’.

Not because I’m ghoulish.  I think I just needed some proof.  I didn’t want to think it was true.

Not again.

Sadly, it was true.  Yet another senseless act.  Illogical.  Unexplainable.  Unfathomable.  Outrageous.  Hideous.