It began with a bang

On April 15, 2013 I was at the Boston Marathon to support my aunt. That day, two bombs went off near the finish line of the marathon 12 seconds apart. The brothers responsible, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, were Muslim immigrants from the Kalmyk Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. They lived in the United States for ten years before the bombing.

Recently there has been a lot of talk about immigrants in the United States. On Jan. 27, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to keep people from entering the United States from seven Muslim majority countries. It has since been ruled unconstitutional.

I was a block away from the second bomb, and though I couldn’t hear or see the bombs go off, I witnessed what followed. People ran away crying and screaming. When we saw people rushing away, I remember my mom trying to figure out what happened: she grabbed my hand and looked like she wanted to cry. That day I woke up happy and went to sleep in complete terror.

Before the bombing, my mom and I ran from mile 17 to the bottom of Heartbreak Hill with my aunt before we decided to try and catch the subway to the finish. There were two high school students handing out cupcakes on the way to the finish, so my mom and I stopped to eat. At one point on the subway, the train stopped and we had to wait for a minute or two. When we got off the subway, we were on a boulevard with plenty of street performers and we stopped to listen. If none of those things had happened that day, my story would be a lot different.

The fact that the Tsarnaevs were Muslims from out of the country is especially relevant now. I was a block away from possible death and two immigrants were to blame, but I still want immigrants to be accepted here because making generalizations about a whole group of people is unethical. I went to therapy for months because I was so scared, but now I know just how rare something like that is. And if I, having personally been affected negatively by an immigrant, can overlook that and welcome immigrants, then so can you. Yes, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were Muslim. And yes, they were immigrants. But that doesn’t mean that all Muslims and immigrants will commit acts of terror. People need to remember that at our most fundamental level, we are all human.