Chechnya. SJ Dodgson MJoTA 2013 v6n1 p0419
April is a magical month for North America as the earth wakes up from a deep sleep and tosses pink and yellow and white and purple and red and blue blossoms near our feet, near our faces and way up in the air.
April brings out the runners, and the crazies. So many Aprils have woken anger that is incomprehensible to the happy and healthy.
In 1993, I was working in a sunny lab at University of Pennsylvania measuring protein concentrations, listening to the radio ambush of the Waco compound in Texas.
In 1995, I was in Freiburg-im-Breisgau, about to get on a train to a conference on carbon dioxide in Switzerland when I glanced up and looked at a clock. At that exact instant, a federal building in Oklahoma was blown up.
And today, April 19 2013, Boston is filled with armored police in the streets, assault weapons ready to blow to kingdom come anything that smells like a threat.
I have another vivid memory. Of watching CNN in my husband's house in Breitnau, a tiny village high in the mountains of the Black Forest near Freiburg-im-Breisgau. Chechnya was under attack from Russia because Chechnya wanted to become its own country, and Russia refused to let it leave. Chechnya had orchestrated terrorist attacks throughoit Russia and had ferociously resisted Russian troops attacking their country.
The memory that is so vivid is of young men dancing, manically dancing. They knew the morning would bring a major Russian attack. Indeed, it did. And that area of Chechnya was brutally bombed and set on fire. Likely the young men all died.
That was about 1993, maybe 1994. At the time, all I could think about was the hatred that anyone Chechen would have for Russia, or for anyone in the United States letting such human rights abuses to happen, and not help.
Is that why Boston was bombed? A sad attempt to avenge the unforgivable, the unavengable?
