Marathon? Seriously?

If you've been following the news lately, you made have heard that the New York City marathon organizers are planning to go through with the marathon this Sunday even though 1) parts of the city have been underwater all week 2) thousands upon thousands of New Yorkers are still without heat or power and 3) any police, other public servants or volunteers that you might use for a marathon would be about a million times more useful in the Rockaways, on Staten Island or at any one of many many other hard hit locations.

At first I honestly thought this must be a joke or a miscommunication.  Maybe Mayor Bloomberg (who was actually doing really well with this until now) said something like "marathon?  are you fucking kidding me?  My city is underwater.  What kind of a stupid question is that?", but because people are stressed and probably weren't really paying attention, it somehow sounded like he said the marathon was actually still going to happen.  Apparently I was wrong.

Many of the people who read my blog already know me a little, but for those who don't, I grew up in Rockaway Park in Queens.  It was an amazing place to be a kid and really is a wonderful little town.  If you've never been there, you just wouldn't believe a place like it could exist within the borders of such a large and crowded city, but that's just one of the things that makes New York better than everywhere else.

I literally don't have a word for what Hurricane Sandy did to my home town.  Every picture and description I see is worse than the one before it.  It's worse than anything I could have imagined.  Now, the people there are tough and it's a great community and they'll rebuild, but in the mean time, it seems the city is going to have a marathon. 

Because it's really important, in this time of great tragedy, that a bunch of people run around the city for a few hours.  Who cares if people in the Rockaways and Staten Island and other parts of the city have no power and no heat?  Who cares if hundreds of homes were destroyed and thousands of people lost everything?  Fuck that shit!  That was like, five days ago.  I guess everybody just needs to get the fuck over it, right?

Listen, I understand that events bring money into the city, money that a recovering city needs, but that doesn't explain why they can't run a marathon on November 25th, or December 2nd.  Do it a month later and everybody still gets their money.  Too cold to run around outside that late in the year?  Really?  Do you remember last paragraph when I said people lost their houses?  If December 2nd is too cold for you to run, then you can run around the city by yourself sometime when the conditions suit you a little better. 

Now you can say I shouldn't be too hard on the actual runners.  They've trained for years and it isn't their decision.  I disagree.  Everybody makes a choice.  You can choose to not participate in this ridiculous farce.  You can choose to do something more productive with your time, like volunteer, or just donate to the Red Cross http://www.redcross.org/  See look, there's the link right there. 

I've seen some stories about people who are going to run the marathon and use it to raise money to donate to victims.  That's nice, but couldn't you just collect money for victims and not spend all day running around a decimated city?  Personally, I would much rather do that.  Running 26 miles is tiring and really hard.  When I was a kid my elementary school did a math-a-thon for St. Jude's hospital.  I suspect my grandma still would have given me a check for the sick kids even if I didn't bother actually doing the math.

And as for the mayor and the organizers of the marathon, I don't know enough different forms of the word fuck to properly address them.  The symbolism alone of the marathon starting by running away from devastated Staten Island should be enough to tell anyone with a brain what a bad idea it is to go through with it.  It's a good thing the rubble of my home town won't disrupt the marathon path, or they might have to run somewhere else.

You know, sometimes I get on here and rant about things that really bother me, but then I have to admit that there's no easy solution and it's not as simple as I'm making it sound.  Not this time.  Just do it later.  How hard is that?  Personally, I don't know why they can't just cancel it altogether and tell the people who would have spent money on the day of the marathon to just donate the money instead, but maybe that's asking too much.  I hope, at least, that this will convince everyone in New York that they can't ever vote for Bloomberg again.