Editorial: Thumbs

To runners.

Today we salute runners in the area. The Boston Marathon bombings have made this year’s local running events particularly poignant and cast a pall of sorrow over them. On Saturday, runners and walkers in the Fountain Lake 5 and Tiger Trot in Albert Lea wore green ribbons to honor the victims of the bombings in Boston. Other upcoming community running events that come to mind this year are the April Sorensen Memorial Half Marathon, the Land Between the Lakes Triathlon, the 5K River Run in Glenville, the Alden Fun Run, the Kiester Days 5K and the Thorne Crest 5K. We hope attendance at these runs this year is high as a means of showing support for lives lost and impacted at the Boston Marathon.

Don’t let the terrorists win. Run.

 

To terrorists.

Attacking America in any way does not work to improve the cause of the terrorists. Look at the Boston Marathon bombing suspects from Chechnya, Russia. That Islamic region has been fighting Russia on and off since the time of Russian Czar Catherine the Great in the 1780s, when a holy war broke out between Christian Russia and Islamic Chechnya.

The fight to throw off Russian hegemony has returned time and again. In modern times it has happened after World War I, during World War II, two outright wars in the 1990s and various terrorist activities since (such as the Belsan School siege that left 380 dead, about half of whom were children). Nearly 60 mass graves have been unearthed in Chechnya from those two wars in the 1990s, revealing the widespread killing the Russian military did to civilians to hold on to the region.

Russia and America aren’t exactly best friends. Any sympathy the Chechens might have had from America and the West was lessened as a result of the 9/11 attacks, because of the Islamic ties. Any remaining sympathy the Chechens might have had was lost completely as a result of the bombing of the Boston Marathon. Terrorism doesn’t advance a cause. It just makes more enemies. Hate spreads hate.

 

To James Kenison and Jesse Boren.

Thanks for using your hovercrafts for removing “thin ice” signs from Albert Lea Lake two weeks ago. What a great time-saver that was for government workers. There are three aerators on the lake. One is run by Freeborn County, another by the Shell Rock River Watershed District and the third by the Minnesota Department of Transportation. Thanks for your community service. Maybe this can become a paid gig. We hope to hear about you next spring.