Life is full of surprises, of the onset of untoward events, of people oblivious to the potential occurrences that will turn their lives inside out, events that creep up silently behind them as they busy themselves in the fullness of life's celebrations, and then pull the rug of mortality out from under. In this case, out from under running feet at the Boston Marathon, where the elite among runners take part in a century-old ritual in that old city of America that has seen so much in its historical drama, and now has been victimized by man's inhumanity to man.

It is beyond impossible to envision minds so warped that the prospect of inflicting mortal pain, fear and suffering on others through deliberate acts of life-sabotage holds allure. The very act of preparing to do irreparable, irreversible harm to other living human beings irrespective of age, gender, culture, and innocence simply because of the hateful urge to inflict death, to maim, motivates minds ravaged by hatred.

A little boy who has been raised in an emotionally caring environment, cherished by his family, with an endearing and wonderful photograph of a wide, gap-toothed smile, holding a poster in his school classroom of grade three children that instructs toward compassion toward humanity. He is now a raw, painful memory to those who knew and loved him, his life precipitously taken in an explosion of raging, lunatic hate. Other children have lost their limbs and their innocence of life.

The deeply painful bruise that has settled further into the American psyche may have left a spirit unbowed to adversity and threat among a resilient people who forge ahead into the future, but it is a bruise that will never heal, the memory of another bloody atrocity resulting from deformed spirits whose life-force is one of malevolence toward others, determined to leave behind them the message that searing hatred governs the possibilities of peace, no matter how many hopeful pleas children emit in their innocence.