Today, Danijela had just arrived from New York City and we went to have something to eat at a Thai place, next to our place, in Fenway. The day was nice and warm, with Spring finally showing herself here in Boston. During lunch we heard two explosions. I thought it was strange and maybe they were from some nearby construction. But today it’s a holiday, so it probably couldn’t be from one. Today was marathon day — the Boston marathon — and earlier there had been a Sox game. There were plenty of people on the streets, enjoying the holiday and the weather. I had passed over the runners that were going through the Commonwealth Ave. tunnel a few hours later. Danijela, who is Croatian, said the booms sounded like this cannon in Zagreb that goes off every noon. I only realized what was happening a few minutes later when the 8 o’clock news were showing in Portugal and some friends were calling to know if we were ok. Only then I knew there had been a bombing at the finish line, two blocks away from our previous apartment, in front of the Portuguese consulate, in front of the window of a shop where I bought a pair of glasses. The remainder of the day was depressive. It is not that the magnitude of the the attack was enormous, but like a shooting at a school, it was perpetrated against a community of people that had peacefully gathered. A day when people stop, go outside, enjoy life. And now we all feel a little less safe, in a world that definitely did not need this.

Oh my, it’s Portugal in the spotlight! But… wait… why are the lights being turned on in Paris and Barcelona after Madrid or Lisbon? Oh my, it seem the Earth spins the other way around! But then again, it’s right at the end of the clip. Is it the Sun that’s acting up? I think the good people of Universal are universally confused.

Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest. But even our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand; neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce, but forcing nothing; establishing (with powers so disposed, in order to give trade a stable course, to define the rights of our merchants, and to enable the government to support them) conventional rules of intercourse, the best that present circumstances and mutual opinion will permit, but temporary, and liable to be from time to time abandoned or varied, as experience and circumstances shall dictate; constantly keeping in view that it is folly in one nation to look for disinterested favors from another; that it must pay with a portion of its independence for whatever it may accept under that character; that, by such acceptance, it may place itself in the condition of having given equivalents for nominal favors, and yet of being reproached with ingratitude for not giving more. There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion, which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.
Washington, The Farewell Address