Like the shots that launched the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775, immortalized by celebrated American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson as the ‘shots heard round the world,’ the attacks in Boston are also reverberating around the world. Sueddeutsche Zeitung columnist Stefan Kornelius writes that the Boston Marathon bombings, occurring on Patriots’ Day, appear well-timed to co-opt what is at the very core of American pride.
For Sueddeutsche Zeitung, talking about the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Stefan Kornelius writes in part:
With pathos and love of country, poet Ralph Waldo Emerson set the battle to verse, immortalizing it in American national mythology. Former President Bill Clinton declared the Concord Hymn to be his favorite poem. And to this day, one of its lines is quoted the world over when someone ominously predicts a great calamity on the horizon:
“Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard around the world.”“The shot heard round the world” was heard loudly and clearly when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was murdered in Sarajevo in 1914. For four years, its echo reverberated through Europe. And now, so many eras later, it is the shot from Boston that is reawakening nagging fears – not just in the U.S. – that it is all starting all over again: the terror, the fear, and the insecurity.
The Boston Marathon is also called the Patriots’ Run, because athletes have been running this course for over a hundred years on Patriots’ Day – the day Bostonians commemorate the Battles of Lexington and Concord. So in that respect, it is not much of a stretch to assume that the perpetrators wanted to co-opt the symbolism of the day, the symbolism of the place, and the symbolism of the sports event. Anyone who detonates two bombs in Boston on this day, hits America especially hard emotionally. This is the day the nation commemorates its strength and resilience, not weakness and moral cowardice.
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