By Michael Y. Park It’s been a pretty horrible and frightening week, but the worst tragedies can also remind us that, sometimes, people thrown into the most awful of circumstances can demonstrate exactly why we’re a species of animal worth fighting for. Naturally, each person rises to the occasion according to his or her talents. While netheads like Anonymous and on boards like 4chan and Reddit play junior detective and pore through the gargantuan load of photos investigators have to go through in hopes of glimpsing “suspicious” characters, Boston restaurateurs and just regular folks have been opening their doors and comforting marathoners, survivors and emergency workers through the power of food. El Pelon Taqueria earned kudos around the Web when it put away the ledger and made itself a public spot for the shell-shocked to come in, charge their cell phones, use their WiFi to e-mail worried relatives, and eat and drink. Most importantly, it offered itself up as a place for people to go if they just didn’t want to be alone. And if they couldn’t pay for their meals, it was gratis. Eastern Standard sent over platters of food to the bewildered marathoners stranded at a nearby hotel lobby. Oleana is putting together a fund raiser to see to the long-term needs of victims of the bombings. And Grub Street Boston put together a list of local eateries that donated 40 percent of their profits last night to the Greg Hill Foundation to go to the aid of marathon-bombing victims. You can expect more charitable dine-out nights to come, I’d wager. For those both inside and outside of Boston, Redditors created a thread called Random Acts of Pizza, in which those who want to help can buy pizzas to be delivered to marathoners in need, hospitals, police and fire stations, and shelters. They’ve racked up at least 1,600 orders. At the Boston Globe website, regular Bostonians flooded the site with offers of food, lodging, and company for marathoners and others affected by the bombings. Boston.com has left the posts up as a tribute to the way Beantowners opened their hearts to complete strangers in one of their city’s darkest days. “Anything you need: food, comfy couch to sleep on, and even some wine and a cat to hang out with for as long as you need,” wrote one good Samaritan. There are more stories like these, and there will be many more to come. As of this writing, we know basically nothing about the perpetrator or perpetrators. But what we already know is that whoever commited one of the most heinous acts in recent memory, whatever his or her supposed motivation or cause, really had one primary goal in mind: to make us afraid, to pull us apart, and to paralyze into inaction by making us fear for our own lives. With their simple acts of human kindness, whether it came in the form of a pizza, a beer or a couch, Bostonians have already proven the marathon bomber a miserable failure.<div

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