I swear I'm not always this serious

But damn it, when serious things happen, I can't help but notice. And when they happen in my house, I take it personally.

I'm referring to Monday's bombings in Moscow's metro. One of the stations involved, Park Kultury, was my home station when I lived in Moscow, during the '95-'96 academic year. To this day I could find my way around that building blindfolded. Hearing that that was where it happened was like hearing that a friend was on one of those trains, and learning that the building itself (as well as the other station involved, Lubyanka) wasn't damaged was almost as great a relief as if my friend had escaped unharmed.

I still can't make myself watch much of the first-on-the-scene videos. The second one I saw showed blood spattered on the tiles of the platform, and I completely lost my shit. It was so much more personal than the shown-ad-nauseam footage of the World Trade Center in 2001 - I've never even been in New York, and it was harder to wrap my head around a catastrophe of that scale, somehow. This was like... seeing the apartment where I spent my teenage years on the news as the scene of a horrific mass murder, with blood splashed across the walls of my old bedroom. That kind of fondness, that kind of familiarity, that kind of NOOOOOOOO.

So, after one day of uncontrollable weeping and a couple more days of thinking about it constantly I'm calmer, at least.

I'm no fan of the Russian Federation's policies in the Caucasus region, don't get me wrong; I'll show you the pictures of me at a 1996 Moscow rally against the war in Chechnya, including the barely-got-it snapshot of Gorbachev, who was a surprise speaker! But, as usual, it's not the governments and their policies that occupy my thoughts, it's the individuals. I think I can understand objectively what it might be like, to have so little hope that blowing yourself up in a crowded metro car - just to make a point?! - seemed like the thing to do. Can't picture doing it myself, but you know, I've read the interviews... I certainly have no solutions to offer in that situation. I have only heartsickness at how people seem to believe they are entitled to impose their ideas on anyone else. I don't care what religion or nationality or ideology or profit you may be using as your justification; I care about innocent blood being spilled.

One thing that has helped me is hearing from everyone who came to visit me in Moscow. They'd all heard about it on the news, and every one of them went "Hey, I was in that station!", and understood why I was so upset. It occurs to me that I actually contributed to making the world a little bit smaller, by being there. People who would never otherwise have been there came because I was, and felt themselves connected to that place in a way they wouldn't have without that experience. Hot damn, all that high-mined stuff on the application essay for the scholarship that got me there, about fostering understanding between formerly adversarial peoples, coming to know each other as individuals and speaking each other's languages? Turns out I accomplished that in a small way after all, even if I didn't end up using the education I gained there in quite the way I intended at the time.