On Monday night I got sick, and I’ve been drifting in and out of a muzzy-headed haze since then, but even in my fuzzy state I still saw the news of the bombing at the Boston marathon and the first thought that struck me was, “Not again!”

Geez! A marathon???

C’mon!

And the second thought that struck me was how the day before, or was it two days before, a report came out that Obama’s drones had killed thousands, that’s right, THOUSANDS, of innocent men, women and civilians in Pakistan and the Middle East, in the hunt for the targets they were after.

And then a perverse little part of me thought, who the hell cares?

Nobody cares over here.

We live our lives, we drink our chai lattes, we put on our exercise or yoga pants and stretch, we run our 10K or walk our 5 K on the treadmill and we cross the finish line, and death and carnage is raining down on people on the other side of the world, who are also just going about their daily lives, drinking their chais, biking or walking to work, squatting by the stove and clapping their chapatis (flat bread) before they cook them over the fire and they go boom, but nobody here knows, or cares.

We don’t count their dead. We only count ours. Three so far. As if that weren’t enough!

The images on the T.V. make me wince. And when I picked up the newspaper that was left in front of my hotel room door, I read the details of the bombing, but I must confess, as soon as I was done what I felt was my duty, and I had grieved for the loss of life and carnage, I turned to the sports page to relive the joint victories of the Maple Leafs (hockey) and the Blue Jays. It’s a rare occurrence when they BOTH win on the same night!

It doesn’t mean that I don’t care.

It doesn’t mean that I don’t hate that it happened.

(And for the sake of the record, YES I CONDEMN THE ATTACK! WHOEVER PERPETRATED IT!

People should be able to run a race without worrying about being blown to bits for goodness sakes!)

It just means I’m tired.

I’ve lived through enough bomb scares and enough weird looks from people because they can tell I’m Muslim, and I’m dog-gone tired of it. And I’m sick, so give me a break!

And I briefly thought of writing some sci-fi dystopian novel about a society of privilege in the future that lives under a glass dome, where everything seems ideal and the barbarians are kept at bay, except that underneath it all, they really aren’t, and I shook my head and thought, “Nope, it’s been done.” Because I basically just described the plot of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.

And when I went to listen to that author Robert Sawyer, (who I met in Saskatchewan), he said that the reason why H.G. Wells is still studied up to this day and his contemporary Jules Verne is not, is because his sci-fi novels contained deep truths that Jules Verne’s did not. Jules Verne basically relied on wowing with the technology, he described a submarine long before anyone was ever made! But his were basic adventure novels whereas H.G. Wells showed through The Time Machine that privilege, in particular WHITE privilege, is detrimental not only to the have nots (the Morlocks) but it’s also detrimental to the haves (the Eloi).

Doesn’t it sound familiar?

Well, remember the old saying, “history not learned is doomed to be repeated”.

It seems as though our lives will change again. We will be frisked before we enter sporting arenas much like we are frisked before boarding planes.

And they’ll keep bombing the disaffected on the other side of the world and keep tightening the security on this side.

*sigh*