Marathon Bombing Survivor Sydney Corcoran Voted Prom Queen
WCVB: LOWELL, Mass. —A teenage girl injured in the Boston Marathon bombings was crowned prom queen Tuesday night. Sydney Corcoran, 18, and her mother, Celeste, were injured in the April 15 attacks… “I keep feeling like I’m going to cry because I’m just happy to be back. See now, I’m going to start crying. It’s just really good to see everyone,” Sydney told Newscenter 5’s Mary Saladna. She said this definitely became a goal during rehab. “When I was in the hospital, I didn’t think this was going to be possible. Then I got to the rehab and I was up and doing things. It felt like I could do it. So it was a goal. This and graduation — definitely goals,” she said. Her friends are just so thrilled she is OK and was able to attend prom. “She’s loyal, trustworthy, she’s just an amazing friend, (I) love her dearly,” said one friend. Sydney graduates from high school on June 7.
The way life is supposed to work is that the older you get, the less you’re supposed to think about young people in general, and high school kids in particular. By now I should be convinced the whole lot of them are incorrigible little snots, interested in nothing but $200 sneakers and scoring Molly and Snapchatting boob shots and there’s no hope any of them will keep the country afloat long enough for me to sponge off them when I’m sick of working. I should be, but I can’t. Especially at a time like this. Because if the Marathon bombings accomplished anything, it was to bring out the best in these kids. The month+ since this happened has served as a reminder that for every misguided anarchic shitbag like the Tsarnaev brothers, there are hundreds of thousands of young people willing to step up to lend comfort to the victims. Whether it’s showing up to a vigil for the Richard family in Dorchester or raising money for the One Fund or just making a girl who woke up in a hospital to find her and her mom had lost legs feel good by making her Prom Queen. It’s hard to develop a bad attitude about kids when they keep showing you the best humanity has to offer.
Lenin once (in)famously said that the purpose of terrorism is to terrify. Whatever else the bombers hoped to achieve, their goal was that we’d all be too scared to go on with our lives and drop everything to embrace whatever crackpot ideology they were nutty enough to believe in. So now that now that we’ve got people streaming into Boylston to pay their restaurant tabs from that day and our high school kids are making dreams come true for the survivors, how’s that plan working out so far? @JerryThornton1