Patton Oswalt’s Facebook Post An Unlikely Dose Of Hope After Boston Tragedy

Patton Oswalt may not be the first person you think of when it comes to reassuring, post-disaster comments, but a Facebook statement the comedian made after the Boston Marathon bombing today has been incredibly popular on the social network.

Patton Oswalt’s Boston Marathon Facebook status update has been shared, at this point, more than 171,000 times since posted earlier today.

Missives like Oswalt’s hopeful yet honest one tend to resonate because they speak both to our pain and jaded feelings as well as the good we all hope to see when violence kills and maims before our very eyes.

We’ve copied and pasted Oswalt’s full post below so you can read it in its entirety — but if you like it, please go over to Facebook to officially do so, and share with your friends if you’re so inclined.

Boston. Fucking horrible.

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, “Well, I’ve had it with humanity.”

But I was wrong. I don’t know what’s going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.

But here’s what I DO know. If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we’re lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they’re pointed towards darkness.

But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago.

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, “The good outnumber you, and we always will.”