Thursday, April 25, 2013

Three days in Boston

The emotional roller-coaster in this city pervades all our lives.  Here are three pictures from this week that run the gamut.

Tuesday evening was cold and misty, and I had a chance to be a referee on a soccer field that was covered with mud.  By the end of the match these 11-year-old boys were also covered with mud.  Do you think they had fun?


On Wednesday morning the Copley "T" stop (part of our local transit system) was reopened for the first time since the Boston Marathon bombing.  There was silence in Copley Square as people dropped by the makeshift memorial that had been set up in honor of people killed and harmed by the bomb blasts just a few yards away.  This part of the memorial made me gasp.


On Thursday, 2000 people went to the World Trade Center in South Boston to take their oaths of U.S. citizenship.  I peered through the glass doors as they raised their hands and swore allegience to their new country.  The judge presiding said, "Don't ever believe that you are less of a US citizen than people born here."

4 comments:

Mani Pulimood said...

That was a very compassionate post. Thank you.

Jennifer Hill said...

Hope is thing with feathers, Emily Dickinson said. Thank you for adding mud, shoes and hands in service.

Nancy said...

A wonderful tribute to life moving forward, looking back and ending up with an expanded view of what's possible and right.

The Download said...

Interesting reference to this post in The Download, produced by Commonwealth Magazine:

About 2,000 immigrants swore allegiance to the United States yesterday as they raised their hands to take the oath of citizenship in the World Trade Center on the South Boston waterfront. But the only way most people would have found out about it was by reading the last paragraph in Paul Levy’s Not Running a Hospital blog entry, where he describes apparently stumbling on the ceremony and peeking in at it through the glass doors.

"Don't ever believe that you are less of a US citizen than people born here," the presiding judge told the new Americans, according to Levy.

It doesn’t appear the Globe or the Herald attended the ceremony since both papers’ websites lacked any mention or pictures of the event. Given the raw emotions surrounding the immigration reform debate, especially in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, you have to wonder if federal officials intentionally downplayed yesterday’s ceremony. Usually, officials send out a press release touting the ceremonies but an online search turned up no advance publicity for the event. The Globe and Herald have run stories and pictures in the past of naturalization ceremonies in Boston, and you have to believe any editor aware of the event would have not hesitated to assign both a reporter and photographer to get reaction.

But the debate right now is so incendiary, there’s little room for moderation in either discussion or coverage....