World's first website rebuilt

An effort is under way by the group that created the Web to rebuild its first site CERN researchers created the World Wide Web in 1989 It was released free to the public on April 30, 1993 Researchers say they want a new generation to see what the Web was like then

(CNN) -- Twenty years ago, a team of researchers shared the Web with the world. Now they want to show a generation that grew up online what it was like in its earliest days.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the date it released, for free, the technology and software needed to run a Web server.

In honor of the anniversary, a team has been assembled to recreate a working version of the first website, a how-to guide hosted by the project's creators.

The organization issued a statement on April 30, 1993, that announced the release of that Web to the public.

British physicist Tim Berners-Lee created and named the Web (also commonly called "W3" for short in those days) in 1989 at CERN. Originally, it was designed as a way for scientists at different universities and other institutes to share information.

"Vague, but exciting," Berners-Lee's supervisor wrote on the cover of a proposal while greenlighting the project.

See a 1993 copy of the first website

By 1993, there were roughly 400 known Web servers. But the World Wide Web accounted for only about 1% of Internet traffic. The rest was remote access to computer networks, e-mail and file transfers from one computer to another.

Since then it has, obviously, become a constant presence in the lives of people around the world. Today, there are somewhere around 630 million websites.

"There is no sector of society that has not been transformed by the invention, in a physics laboratory, of the Web," said Rolf Heuer, CERN's director-general. "From research to business and education, the Web has been reshaping the way we communicate, work, innovate and live. The Web is a powerful example of the way that basic research benefits humankind."

The first website was, not surprisingly, devoted to the Web project itself, describing how to use it and set up a Web server. It was hosted on Berner-Lee's NeXt computer -- the product developed at a company founded by Steve Jobs before he returned to Apple.

That computer is still at CERN's headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. But it no longer hosts that first website.

CERN's team aims to change that, restoring the earliest versions of files that were on the site as well as making it a home for stories about those formative days. They'll be combing CERN's servers for data preserved from that time.

Bin Laden dead, bin Ladenism lives

Peter Bergen: It was easier for the U.S. to kill bin Laden than to kill his ideology The Boston bombing is one case in which bin Laden's ideology may have played a role, he says The majority of Muslims reject bin Ladenism, but there are still some adherents, he says Bergen: Syrian conflict is another arena in which bin Ladenism is active

Editor's note: Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a director at the New America Foundation and the author of "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden -- From 9/11 to Abbottabad," the basis for the documentary "Manhunt" that premieres on HBO on May 1 and will be shown on CNN on May 10.

(CNN) -- Killing the man proved easier than killing his ideology.

Following a decade-long hunt, Osama bin Laden was finally run to ground in Pakistan two years ago.

Bin Laden did not die on the bloody battlefield of a holy war but in a suburban compound in the comfortable city of Abbottabad in northern Pakistan, surrounded by three of his wives and a dozen of his children and grandchildren.

The anti-heroic death of the al Qaeda leader was greeted by only small protests in the Muslim world. And worries that bin Laden's "martyrdom" would unleash a new wave of terrorist attacks have proved unfounded.

At the time of bin Laden's death on May 1, 2011, core al Qaeda had already been severely degraded by CIA drone strikes. Drones have killed at least 30 leaders of al Qaeda in Pakistan, according to a count by the New America Foundation. Some of the most senior al Qaeda leaders had also been arrested in Pakistan.

As Marty Martin, who headed CIA operations against al Qaeda in the years after 9/11, puts it in the HBO documentary "Manhunt": "Congratulations, Abu Butthead, you're now the No. 3 in al Qaeda; that's the good news. The bad news is, you're now the No. 3 in al Qaeda. Get ready. Buckle your chinstrap, because your career path is probably going to be short-lived."

As a result of CIA operations, the al Qaeda core is now on life support. Simultaneously, bin Laden's overall strategy has failed. Instead of forcing the United States to pull out of the Middle East as bin Laden had predicted would happen after the 9/11 attacks, the United States, together with its allies, largely destroyed al Qaeda in Afghanistan and later invaded Iraq while building up massive American military bases in Muslim countries such as Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain.

Bergen: Agencies often miss warning signs of attacks

If bin Laden's strategy of attacking the United States was a failure, his ideas, unfortunately, may have more lasting currency, at least among a small minority in the Muslim world.

Like many of history's most effective leaders, bin Laden told a simple story about the world that his followers around the globe found easy to grasp. In his telling, there was a conspiracy by the West and its puppet allies in the Muslim world to destroy true Islam, a conspiracy led by the United States. As a result of this purported conspiracy, violence against the United States was a necessity.

Bin Laden's single narrative of a war on Islam by the West also purports to explain all the problems of the Muslim world: for example, that the long-running war between Russia and the Chechens is not a centuries-old imperialist land grab by the Russians but is rather a Western war against Islam.

So, too, are the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has told investigators were among the reasons he and his brother carried out the bombings that targeted the Boston Marathon, according to a U.S. government official who briefed CNN.

Al Qaeda, the organization that bin Laden created during the late 1980s, has now morphed into a loose jihadist ideological movement. That movement spawned the most spectacular terrorist attacks in the United States since 9/11 in the form of the Tsarnaev brothers, who authorities said killed four and injured some 250 others during the course of a five-day killing spree in Boston this month.

Peter Bergen

This is bin Laden's most toxic legacy: "Binladenism."

It is an ideological movement that is supported by an entire jihadist ecosystem in which the Tsarnaev brothers and other militants can easily swim.

Bergen: Who really killed bin Laden?

The widely available English language webzine Inspire is produced by al Qaeda's Yemeni affiliate and teaches recruits in the West how to build bombs. Password-protected jihadist forums allow militants to "meet" electronically and clandestinely. Firebrand clerics preach hate in colloquial English on the Internet, and shadowy overseas militant groups allied to al Qaeda or influenced by its ideology have recruited and trained many thousands of militants during the past decade, including dozens of Americans.

The most effective of these militant groups today is the Nusrah Front in Syria, which is essentially a rebranded franchise of al Qaeda's Iraq affiliate.

Mukasey: 'Make no mistake, it was jihad' Bin Laden raid - SEALs' accounts

Nusrah is the most effective force fighting the Bashar al-Assad regime and is widely regarded as the most disciplined of the hundreds of opposition groups now fighting in Syria.

Nusrah seems to have learned from the mistakes of al Qaeda in Iraq, which wantonly killed fellow Muslims and imposed Taliban-style rule on Iraq's Sunni population, provoking a tribal rebellion against al Qaeda known as the Sunni Awakening that began in 2006 and devastated al Qaeda in Iraq.

Nusrah is avoiding these kinds of mistakes and is actually providing services in a systematic way to the populated area it controls, something of a first for an al Qaeda affiliate. Nusrah makes large quantities of much-needed bread for the desperate Syrian population and even controls some of Syria's oil fields.

In the documents that were picked up by the U.S. Navy SEAL team that raided bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad are many examples of bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders urging fellow militants to avoid causing Muslim civilian casualties and to learn from the mistakes of al Qaeda in Iraq.

In Syria, these lessons, for the moment, seem to be being heeded, while the tragedy in Boston shows that the death of bin Laden did not lead to the death of his ideas.

Bergen: Should we still fear al Qaeda?

This is underlined by a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center in spring 2012, a year after bin Laden was killed, finding that in Pakistan, 13% of Muslims held a favorable view of al Qaeda. In Jordan, 15% expressed a positive opinion, and the group received its highest ratings in Egypt, where 21% held a favorable view.

These favorable numbers are, of course, far outweighed by the unfavorable views that al Qaeda enjoys in the same countries. For most Muslims, whatever fleeting attraction al Qaeda's ideology may once have enjoyed has largely evaporated, in particular because al Qaeda and it allies have killed so many Muslim civilians around the Islamic world.

But Binladenism continues to excite a small but not insignificant minority of Muslims. We will be living with this ideology for many years to come until it is finally consigned to "history's unmarked grave of discarded lies," as President George W. Bush eloquently put it in a speech to Congress 10 days after 9/11.

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Finishing marathon 13 days late

John Sutter went with a Boston Marathon runner to another marathon, in Oklahoma City He also went to explore how his home city had gotten past 1995 Oklahoma City bombing tragedy During marathon, he learned other stories of runners whose lives touched by that bombing Sutter: A librarian he met embodied the yen to help others that can be a reaction to tragedy

Editor's note: John D. Sutter is a human rights and social change columnist at CNN Opinion. E-mail him at CTL@CNN.com or follow him on Twitter (@jdsutter), Facebook or Google+.

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (CNN) -- Sara Hunt, a 25-year-old with a big smile and an enormous sense of cheery determination, never seems to do anything halfway.

She loves softball, so she plays on four teams.

She felt out of shape last year, so she decided to run the Boston Marathon.

John D. Sutter

When that race was hit with two explosions that killed three people and injured scores more, Hunt didn't want to wait until next year to complete her first marathon. She traveled to Oklahoma City over the weekend to run in one that memorializes the 1995 bombing that killed 168 people there.

She wanted to finish what she started.

I was struck by Hunt's courage: to want to run a marathon again after only 13 days of rest; to do so knowing that the closer she got to the finish line the more she would have to confront her memories of the bombing in Boston; to immerse herself in another city that knows tragedy all too well.

I was so impressed by her story -- by her desire to learn from the survivors in Oklahoma City -- that I traveled there to watch her run.

It was a homecoming of sorts for me. I grew up in the Oklahoma City area and heard the explosion that changed so many lives in my hometown.

Perhaps that is the reason I felt a personal connection to the people who were injured and killed at the marathon in Boston. And it's probably why I was so interested in a group of people online who were pledging to "Run for Boston" in the wake of that tragedy. Instead of being afraid, they laced up their shoes and hit the pavement. There's something powerful and symbolic in that action, and I decided to join them, pledging to run a marathon by the 1-year anniversary of the Boston bombing and creating an iReport page on CNN where you can sign up to do the same. So far, more than 300 people have.

I also used this trip as a way to explore in more detail how my home city has been able to move past the tragedy. OKC is known for all sorts of things now -- an NBA team with a humble superstar; a river that hosts world-class regattas; a weight-loss-crazy mayor; a new (and way-too-enormous) skyscraper that went up amid a recession, thanks to a boon in the natural gas industry. But when I lived here, when that bomb went off, tragedy defined the place.

For years, when I told people I was from OKC, the next question usually was, "Were you there during the bombing?" I rarely get asked that these days.

Hunt seemed to be on a similar journey of discovery, but for different reasons. In Boston, she had completed nearly 26 miles of the 26.2-mile route when the blasts ended the race.

What it means to be 'Boston strong' Why give bombing suspect Miranda rights? Fmr. CIA: Suspects didn't act alone

Of course, there were much greater tragedies that occurred that day. Spectators lost limbs. An 8-year-old boy was among the dead. But the attack shook Hunt. Now, sudden noises, like balloons popping, make her jump, sometimes to the point that she covers her head for protection. The sounds take her back to the moment she heard the blast and saw the smoke rising above Boston, when runners turned around in panic and rushed the other way. She was terrified, unsure what had happened.

"It was like being in a movie," she told me. "Seeing the trucks and bomb squads ... I'm from a small town. We don't even have police where I live."

For an hour and a half after the bombing, the young woman from Putnam, Connecticut, was unable to reach her mom, who had been standing at the finish line, near the explosions. Her mother was unharmed, but that was a frantic hour, spent begging strangers to let her use their cell phones.

So, Hunt came to Oklahoma City with a dual mission: She wanted to finish the race she had started, but she also wanted to look for clues about how to move through a tragedy, how to process it so it will cease to haunt her.

"It's another community that's gone through something like (the Boston bombing)," she said. "It's nice to talk to people who know what you've seen and gone through."

As it turned out, many of the clues she received came from strangers -- those she met on the course, and those who influenced its very existence.

'Runners are like the wind'

The thought that Oklahoma City could be bombed again had occurred to her.

But Hunt didn't want to let that interfere.

When she arrived downtown, before 5 a.m., a three-quarter moon hanging in the sky, the only change she made to her routine was to bring a cell phone.

She hadn't done that on a run before. But she wanted one in Oklahoma.

Just in case.

It was a chilly 50 degrees that morning. Runners gathered early for a sunrise service beneath an American Elm that locals call the "survivor tree." It nearly shriveled up and died after the bombing. Eighteen years later, it still has some scars and gnarly branches, but it's also tall and green and full of life.

Hunt listened as a preacher told the runners who had gathered in the dark for a blessing before the race that they didn't need to think about the path ahead. A higher power would carry them onward.

He encouraged them to think of each breath as "a sublime gift" from above.

Hunt didn't meet him, but standing elsewhere beneath the tree was Tom Kight, a 74-year-old Oklahoma City man dressed in a red pullover, in honor of Boston's Red Sox. (He couldn't find the socks, which many runners in Oklahoma City wore as a tribute to the victims in Boston.) He comes to this spot every year to remember his stepdaughter, Frankie Ann Merrell, who was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing.

The service beneath the tree is a highlight of Kight's year. He loves the sunrise, the anticipation. The powerful symbolism of running for progress.

"Runners are like the wind," he said. "There's nothing that stops them."

Kight, who has knee problems that prevent him from running, has made it his personal mission to ensure that the names of all 168 Oklahoma City bombing victims appear on the jerseys of runners in the race.

It's important to him that the victims' names live on. Seeing the names gives new life to those who died here. And it brings him incredible comfort.

"We're not going to forget the people in Boston," he said. "You can rest assured."

'We will finish this race'

If the bombing wasn't already on Hunt's mind, it would have been impossible to escape it in the early morning hours in Oklahoma City.

Helicopters circled like buzzards. Police were everywhere. A moment of silence was held for the victims -- 168 seconds for Oklahoma City; three for Boston.

And then there was the location.

The race starts where the Alfred P. Murrah building once stood -- until the bombing on April 19, 1995. The memorial to that site -- a field with one empty chair for each victim and two large metal gates, marked 9:01 and 9:03, bookending that moment in time -- butts right up against the starting line.

The race begins on the 9:03 side, a symbol of moving forward.

But it's also a reminder that tragedy can strike anywhere, anytime.

Crowds were thick as more than 25,000 runners geared up to start. Some ran in quick circles to get loose. Others leaned on each other for warmth. One man swooshed his hips around in a hula-hooping motion. (Aren't these people about to get enough exercise?) A man barked over a loudspeaker in a voice that seemed more fit for a football stadium: "We stand as one, showing the world that good always overcomes evil ..." the voice said. "We will finish this race."

Even at the start, Hunt was unwaveringly sure she could do just that.

"I have good endurance," she told me beforehand. "I don't give up on things."

She wore a "Boston Strong" sign on her stomach and her race number from the April 15 Boston Marathon on her back. Two Boston bracelets dangled on her wrist.

Her get-up attracted the attention of another Boston runner, who decided to run the start of the race by her side. It turned out both had been turned around by the blast in Boston at nearly the same time. Both offered words of encouragement, Hunt told me. Together, they vowed to cross the finish, for themselves and for Boston.

'I couldn't move'

It wasn't long before Hunt's new running mate had left her behind. She didn't take offense at that -- this was her race and she intended to run it on her own terms.

The cheers of the crowd fueled her.

About an hour into the race, Hunt ran by Terri Talley, 45, who was dumping pitcher after pitcher of a yellow sports drink into tiny paper cups. Others passed the cups to the runners. Down the road, volunteers used rakes to scrape the empty cups into piles, as if they were cleaning up leaves from an autumn yard. "Celebration" was playing on an outdoor sound system when I walked up. A woman cheered through a megaphone. Others danced with pom-poms.

She doesn't tell any of the runners about it, but Talley, a peppy woman with blond highlights in her hair and small rhinestones on the temples of her glasses, worked on the third floor of the building that was bombed in 1995.

She was buried in the rubble and nearly died.

"I couldn't move," she said. "As hard as I tried to move, I couldn't move."

Talley was coming in and out of consciousness when rescue workers found her trapped in a vertical wall of rubble and debris. All they could see, she said, was her butt, which caught their attention in part because she was wearing a suit with a loud houndstooth pattern. She jokes that it's her backside that saved her.

"I always say, 'Thank you, Mom and Dad for giving me a nice size booty,'" she told me, laughing. That's something she's only been able to do with distance.

Three rescuers stayed through a second bomb scare, she said, to pull her from the rubble when others had left the disaster site, fearing for their lives.

"When they pulled me out, I was blue and I was losing oxygen. I probably would have died if they had left me" during the second scare, she said.

She still keeps in touch with one rescuer and her ambulance driver.

Talley said she'll never put the tragedy behind her. Eighteen of her 33 coworkers at a credit union were killed that day, she said. For years, she had nightmares. Blooming trees and flowers can cause her to slide into depression.

"Everything about the month of April makes you really, really think about that. Even though it's been 18 years, it seems like not so long ago."

On Sunday, the sun was out and flowers were in bloom. But Talley was in high spirits. Seeing all these strangers running for her friends who died, and in support of her ongoing recovery, is an intense and meaningful experience.

Her advice for runners like Hunt who experienced something in Boston that may change them for a long time, if not permanently?

Keep doing marathons -- or get deeply involved in another community activity.

"Always be around a marathon," she said. "Whether you can run it or not, there's such energy from a marathon."

'I'm not in New England anymore'

Hunt's energy reserves seemed nearly exhausted around the halfway mark. It's not that she was out of fuel, but she could feel a new tightness in her legs; she figured it was residual from the marathon she ran less than two weeks before.

I caught up with her briefly between miles 17 and 18.

She had spoken with her mom on the phone a mile or so before. That was a good pick-me-up, she said. Her mom is one reason she was running in the first place.

Hunt had never run a marathon before Boston, and was able to enter that time-regulated race because she was raising money -- about $3,000 -- for cancer research and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Her mom was diagnosed with a rare, cancerous tumor on her face about two years ago, she said. The treatment was "hard to watch," she said, because it involved radiation that burned her mother's face.

Hunt also had scares with cancerous cells in her cervix a few years ago.

She had only taken up running about a year before Boston. It started with a one-mile run -- she wanted to test herself. With characteristic gusto, she ended up running more than a dozen races over the course of the year.

Hearing her story makes me believe I'll be able to complete a marathon by next year. She makes it sound so easy. You just have to commit. And then go.

She trained largely by herself, and lost more than 50 pounds in the process.

As I trotted along beside her for five or 10 minutes, I noticed she was sweating, and she told me she hadn't expected it to be this hot or hilly in Oklahoma. Temperatures topped 80 degrees that afternoon. When I found her, she was walking down a hill in a neighborhood, conserving energy and taking it slow because of the heat.

"I'm not in New England anymore," she said.

Throughout the morning, she kept hearing sirens, too.

At one point an ambulance drove by, and she covered her ears. Those noises put her back in Boston, and the panic that followed the bombs.

'You gotta pay it forward'

Early in the morning, the pack of runners looked like a pulsing river of humanity, thousands of heads bobbing down the same stream, churning in a sort of collective, perpetual energy. From afar, it looked like no individual had to expend any effort.

Anyone could do this, I thought. It's like "Finding Nemo." Just keep running.

But around the halfway point, the runners, including Hunt, had thinned out into individual dribs and drabs. It became clear that some might not make it. There were people whose feet barely looked to be leaving the ground. Others were so drenched in sweat they almost looked as though they just popped out of a lake. It was sometimes frantic and painful to watch.

It suddenly made sense why there were medic tents nearby.

Apparently some people's nipples bleed by the time they reach the finish.

Running a marathon really is no joke.

Another person I saw near mile 17 was Gary Woodbridge, 47. He said he was so tired that he had left his earphones in his ears even though his phone had lost power.

Taking out the earphones would be too much effort, he said, smiling.

Woodbridge ran with a name on his bib: Ronota Newberry-Woodbridge.

That's the wife he lost in the Oklahoma City bombing.

"She always wanted to run a marathon and I finally lost enough weight where I thought I could try," he told me before the race. "I'm not getting any younger."

Memories of her, and their runs together, occupied his thoughts.

"I'm still moving," he said. "I feel every step."

Woodbridge waited 11 days to learn his wife was dead. He spent much of that time at First Christian Church, another site on the marathon route, which became a support center for families who were in that limbo. The thing that has helped him move forward from her death is talking to other people, he said. "Your grief is going to be very unique. It's going to be very unique to you," he said. "But there are people who have been through what you've been through."

Reaching out to help others was also important for him. He has volunteered to talk to kids who have lost loved ones. And he went to New York after the 9/11 attacks.

"I was shown so much love" after the Oklahoma City bombing, he said. "You gotta pay it forward."

As I walked back to the car from that spot in the course, I saw a man on one knee in front of a lamppost, one hand on the pole and head bowed.

I assumed he was vomiting. That wouldn't have seemed out of place.

But then I realized there was a banner at the top of the pole -- one of 168 signs with a name of an Oklahoma City victim on it. I gave him some space and then asked, after he'd rejoined the runners, if Antonio "Tony" C. Reyes, the name on the banner, was someone he'd known personally. A friend? A family member?

No, he said. "That's someone I run for every year."

He ran in honor of a stranger.

'Well, run with me'

Hunt found a bigger challenge at the 20-mile mark.

Before the race, she had insisted on not knowing the course route.

"If it's a hill, it's a hill," she said. "I'll have to run it.

So no one had told her that the last several miles of the Oklahoma City marathon course go gradually uphill toward the finish line.

Discouraged by the heat and the elevation changes, Hunt started walking again. The pain of the race was setting in. Maybe her legs weren't invincible after all.

But a woman from Tennessee came to her rescue.

She approached her and asked about the Boston number on her back. Hunt told her the story: the training, the bombing, the disappointment. And the fear. How it was too soon for even a serious marathoner to be running a race again.

How she was really just a beginner.

"She was like, 'well, run with me,'" Hunt recalled.

"It definitely helped."

So did the cheers from anonymous fans.

Soon, Hunt was approaching the mile-marker in the race where the bomb went off in Boston, when she saw the cloud of smoke rising from the city and the runners frantically turning the other direction and running in panic, fearing for their lives.

Instead of being afraid, she felt motivated.

"Once I hit the point where I stopped in Boston, I was like, 'No more walking. I'm running this. This race, this is for Boston. I'm finishing.'"

'On top of the world'

I saw Hunt on the home stretch, headed for the core of downtown Oklahoma City, with a smile plastered across her face. Fans stood on both sides of Broadway Avenue, ringing cowbells, shouting "woo!!" and "you got it!!" and "let's go!!!" All of that stuff would seem annoyingly over-energized on any normal Sunday morning. But here it was infectious. I found myself joining in, cheering hardest for the people who were walking or jogging the slowest, those who looked like they would barely make it. I saw one man stop to vomit and then continue toward the finish. I mean, wow.

No one seemed concerned about bombs or terror.

"We all run for a reason here!" an announcer said. "We run to remember!"

Hunt said she left the traumatic memories mostly behind on that last stretch.

When she crossed the finish line, after having that experience robbed from her in Boston, and knowing that so many people had so much more taken from them on that day, she threw her arms into the air. Tears came to her eyes, but she quickly wiped them away. She's too tough for that. "When I saw (the finish) I couldn't stop running," she said. "Even though I was dying, I wanted to keep going."

She added: "I'm on top of the world right now."

The thing that kept her moving was the aid of complete strangers.

'A step in her healing'

Earlier in the week, before the marathon, I met with Ernestine Clark, 69, who was in a library near the Murrah Building when it was bombed. I'd read about her story online and was amazed by the steps she'd taken to create something positive out of a horrifying experience.

I wanted to learn something from her about paying it forward. I thought it might help with my Run for Boston project, which essentially is trying to bring strangers together to support the people of that community.

And I also thought it might help Hunt.

Clark greeted me at her door with a smile on Saturday morning, wearing pearl earrings and red glasses. We talked for a while in her living room and then she told me she wanted to show me something in her backyard, which is well gardened and is filled with the soothing clang of wind chimes.

It was an elm, taller than her house.

She told me it grew from a tiny sapling from the survivor tree at the bombing site.

She put a metal sign at the base of the tree, explaining its origins -- that this tree grew out of tragedy and was now probably the best and sturdiest plant in the yard. When she dies and the house goes to someone else, she said, she wants the new buyer to know about the tree. That way, if he or she cuts it down, they'll know they're going straight to hell, she told me, laughing wildly.

Clark told me about the nightmares she had after the bombing. They lasted for three years. Many nights she dreamed she knew of an imminent bomb attack, but that she was unable to evacuate or warn people in time. She worked in the Oklahoma City library at the time of the bombing. It shattered the window and blew her out of a room and into a hallway. She told me how she staggered around downtown in a daze. All the buildings seemed like they were bending toward her.

"At times, I felt I was crazy," she told me. "I would look into the mirror and I would just not know who that person was. It took me down to the quick."

In an experience that parallels Hunt's, Clark once jumped under a table at dinner when the restaurant's air conditioner popped on suddenly. Shattering a drinking glass once brought her to tears. It reminded her of the glass that was broken in the bombing, that stuck in the sides of the survivor tree, and that made its way between the pages of many of the library's books.

When she couldn't sleep, Clark made a pact with another survivor to go sit in the dark at the bombing memorial downtown, where the OKC marathon begins.

They would sit in the dark in silence holding hands.

Just for comfort. Just to be there.

She also wrote. She bought her first computer after the bombing and she told that machine about what she had seen in 1995 before she could tell another person.

Clark isn't able to walk well enough to go to the marathon these days, but she was instrumental in planning and shaping the memorial that it commemorates. She's been a quiet but adamant representative for victims of the tragedy and their families.

I told Clark a little bit about Hunt, the runner from Connecticut. How she wanted to finish what she'd started. How she was looking for answers in this city. Clark said the Oklahoma City marathon "will be a step in her healing."

"There will be many, many more," she said.

And then she said something kind of amazing.

She offered to help a stranger.

It's something she's done many times. She received letters from all over the country after the Oklahoma City bombing. Talking to strangers shortly after the blast was easier than speaking to her own family members, she said. They brought her comfort. They helped her get to the point where she could join society again.

She's done a great deal to pay that back. She visited Cameroon to meet with people who live in a village that was decimated by a volcanic eruption in the 1980s. She befriended her translator there and eventually helped him earn a scholarship to attend graduate school at her alma mater, Oklahoma State University.

She wrote letters to people in Columbine. After the Boston Marathon bombing, she encouraged church members to make a sign showing support for the victims. They sent it to another church of the same denomination in Boston.

"The day of the Boston Marathon, that just put me in a deep hole," she said. "I cried all day. (Tragedies like that) can throw you back there.

"The difference is, after 18 years, I can pull myself out of it."

When I mentioned Hunt, she didn't hesitate to say that if the young woman from the Boston area ever needs to talk to someone, she should get her number from me and give her a call.

After all, what are strangers for?

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Brazile: But can Jason Collins play?

Donna Brazile says her sports-fan dad would have been unconcerned about sexuality He'd have said, "Yeah, but can the dude play?" Competence not same as sexuality, she says She says orientation should be a yawn in a just world, but Collins' coming out hugely important Brazile: Homophobia crumbling. First with don't ask, don't tell repeal, now in sports

Editor's note: Donna Brazile, a CNN contributor and a Democratic strategist, is vice chairwoman for voter registration and participation at the Democratic National Committee. She is a nationally syndicated columnist, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and author of "Cooking with Grease: Stirring the Pot in America." She was manager for the Gore-Lieberman presidential campaign in 2000.

(CNN) -- My dad was an avid sports fan and a great athlete in his day. We used to watch basketball and football games together, and I know some of his proudest moments as a father were when I wore my sports uniforms in high school and college.

He was a man's man — a hard drinking, foul-mouthed veteran of the Korean War who came on to every voluptuous nurse who crossed his path. He passed away about this time last year.

I think about him often, and more during March Madness. I thought about him yesterday as I read about Jason Collins coming out as the first openly gay player in NBA history. I wondered, "If my dad were reading this, what would he say?"

And, clear as day, I heard his voice. "Yeah, but can the dude play?"

It made me laugh because isn't it just that simple? Can he play? Can he do his job?

At the same time that Jason Collins' announcement has caused a stir, there also has been noteworthy non-reaction among many. "Is this really still news?" we ask. The answer is yes. It is news because it's never happened before.

Pro sports, especially the ones where athletes get paid millions upon millions of dollars, are bastion of masculinity. Manhood, athleticism and heterosexuality are all woven together in our cultural paradigm. It's still news because the stereotype of gay men as being effete, weak, uncoordinated (except where it comes to Lady Gaga impersonations) and otherwise "girly" is still so strong.

It shouldn't be. Gay comes in all shapes, sizes, strengths and personalities. Just like straight does. It shouldn't be news that— guess what — some gay people don't fit your stereotype. But it is.

It shouldn't be news for that reason, but I'm grateful that it is news for an entirely different reason. Jason's coming out is a very, very public "it gets better" message to all the LGBTQ youth coming up, and out, right now. According to the Trevor Project, an organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to LGBTQ youth, suicide is the third leading cause of death for 10- to 24-year-olds, and its the second leading cause of death on college campuses. Lesbian, gay and bisexual youth are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers.

This is why an openly gay NBA player should be news, because it busts stereotypes, normalizes homosexuality and gives kids of all orientations a positive role model of self-love and professional excellence.

Obama: 'Very proud' of Jason Collins Does Collins coming out change the game? Barkley: Jason Collins will open debate

Until there are no more hate crimes, no more vicious bullying and ugly slurs, whenever a person comes out — whether that person is a celebrity or a "nobody" — it should be celebrated like the triumph of courage it is. That is why it should be news. Jason Collins is tremendously brave and deserves to be celebrated as such.

All that said, we aback to the question my dad would have asked. "Yeah, but can the dude play?" Yes, he can play. He's an aggressive, big man who holds his space on the court. At 34, he's probably aging out of the sport, but he's played consistently and well over the years and deserves to be remembered for what he has done on the court, not what he did while off.

I applaud his career and his bravery, and I look forward to the day that sexual orientation is a non-issue. We are all so much more than our sexuality. It is vital to the situations in which it's important — namely, in looking for a mate — but it has nothing to do with job performance, whether your job is as a secretary or a professional basketball player. Our sexuality is just one of a thousand pieces of our identity, not the sole determining factor.

Jason Collins is gay. That's not all he is, and it would be nice if we could keep this one piece of identity in context with the whole.

Finally, it's nice to see institutionalized homophobia crumbling. First it was the military, with the repeal of don't ask, don't tell. For decades, the argument had been that having openly gay people in the military would impair unit cohesion. Setting aside all the flawed assumptions that undergird those fears, you know what has happened to unit cohesion since the fall of don't ask, don't tell? It's stayed the same or gotten slightly better. This is probably because it's easier for people to bond when they're not forbidden from being themselves.

First, it was the military, now it's pro sports being forced to realize that there is no "us" and "them" when it comes to sexuality. We are all on the same team. I'll bet that Jason Collins will be the first in a string of professional athletes to openly acknowledge their homosexuality. You can also think of him as the next in a chain of civil rights pioneers. And I'll bet you'll start seeing them play a bit better. We're all at our best when we don't have to hide who we are, when we can bring it all to the court.

I'm proud to see Jason come out and encouraged to see the overwhelmingly positive reaction he's received. And yet, I can't wait for the day we greet it with "so what?" and a yawn. I think my dad would agree.

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In OKC, running with tragedy

John Sutter went with a Boston Marathon runner to another marathon, in Oklahoma City He also went to explore how his home city had gotten past 1995 Oklahoma City bombing tragedy During marathon, he learned other stories of runners whose lives touched by that bombing Sutter: A librarian he met embodied the yen to help others that can be a reaction to tragedy

Editor's note: John D. Sutter is a human rights and social change columnist at CNN Opinion. E-mail him at CTL@CNN.com or follow him on Twitter (@jdsutter), Facebook or Google+.

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (CNN) -- Sara Hunt, a 25-year-old with a big smile and an enormous sense of cheery determination, never seems to do anything halfway.

She loves softball, so she plays on four teams.

She felt out of shape last year, so she decided to run the Boston Marathon.

John D. Sutter

When that race was hit with two explosions that killed three people and injured scores more, Hunt didn't want to wait until next year to complete her first marathon. She traveled to Oklahoma City over the weekend to run in one that memorializes the 1995 bombing that killed 168 people there.

She wanted to finish what she started.

I was struck by Hunt's courage: to want to run a marathon again after only 13 days of rest; to do so knowing that the closer she got to the finish line the more she would have to confront her memories of the bombing in Boston; to immerse herself in another city that knows tragedy all too well.

I was so impressed by her story -- by her desire to learn from the survivors in Oklahoma City -- that I traveled there to watch her run.

It was a homecoming of sorts for me. I grew up in the Oklahoma City area and heard the explosion that changed so many lives in my hometown.

Perhaps that is the reason I felt a personal connection to the people who were injured and killed at the marathon in Boston. And it's probably why I was so interested in a group of people online who were pledging to "Run for Boston" in the wake of that tragedy. Instead of being afraid, they laced up their shoes and hit the pavement. There's something powerful and symbolic in that action, and I decided to join them, pledging to run a marathon by the 1-year anniversary of the Boston bombing and creating an iReport page on CNN where you can sign up to do the same. So far, more than 300 people have.

I also used this trip as a way to explore in more detail how my home city has been able to move past the tragedy. OKC is known for all sorts of things now -- an NBA team with a humble superstar; a river that hosts world-class regattas; a weight-loss-crazy mayor; a new (and way-too-enormous) skyscraper that went up amid a recession, thanks to a boon in the natural gas industry. But when I lived here, when that bomb went off, tragedy defined the place.

For years, when I told people I was from OKC, the next question usually was, "Were you there during the bombing?" I rarely get asked that these days.

Hunt seemed to be on a similar journey of discovery, but for different reasons. In Boston, she had completed nearly 26 miles of the 26.2-mile route when the blasts ended the race.

What it means to be 'Boston strong' Why give bombing suspect Miranda rights? Fmr. CIA: Suspects didn't act alone

Of course, there were much greater tragedies that occurred that day. Spectators lost limbs. An 8-year-old boy was among the dead. But the attack shook Hunt. Now, sudden noises, like balloons popping, make her jump, sometimes to the point that she covers her head for protection. The sounds take her back to the moment she heard the blast and saw the smoke rising above Boston, when runners turned around in panic and rushed the other way. She was terrified, unsure what had happened.

"It was like being in a movie," she told me. "Seeing the trucks and bomb squads ... I'm from a small town. We don't even have police where I live."

For an hour and a half after the bombing, the young woman from Putnam, Connecticut, was unable to reach her mom, who had been standing at the finish line, near the explosions. Her mother was unharmed, but that was a frantic hour, spent begging strangers to let her use their cell phones.

So, Hunt came to Oklahoma City with a dual mission: She wanted to finish the race she had started, but she also wanted to look for clues about how to move through a tragedy, how to process it so it will cease to haunt her.

"It's another community that's gone through something like (the Boston bombing)," she said. "It's nice to talk to people who know what you've seen and gone through."

As it turned out, many of the clues she received came from strangers -- those she met on the course, and those who influenced its very existence.

'Runners are like the wind'

The thought that Oklahoma City could be bombed again had occurred to her.

But Hunt didn't want to let that interfere.

When she arrived downtown, before 5 a.m., a three-quarter moon hanging in the sky, the only change she made to her routine was to bring a cell phone.

She hadn't done that on a run before. But she wanted one in Oklahoma.

Just in case.

It was a chilly 50 degrees that morning. Runners gathered early for a sunrise service beneath an American Elm that locals call the "survivor tree." It nearly shriveled up and died after the bombing. Eighteen years later, it still has some scars and gnarly branches, but it's also tall and green and full of life.

Hunt listened as a preacher told the runners who had gathered in the dark for a blessing before the race that they didn't need to think about the path ahead. A higher power would carry them onward.

He encouraged them to think of each breath as "a sublime gift" from above.

Hunt didn't meet him, but standing elsewhere beneath the tree was Tom Kight, a 74-year-old Oklahoma City man dressed in a red pullover, in honor of Boston's Red Sox. (He couldn't find the socks, which many runners in Oklahoma City wore as a tribute to the victims in Boston.) He comes to this spot every year to remember his stepdaughter, Frankie Ann Merrell, who was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing.

The service beneath the tree is a highlight of Kight's year. He loves the sunrise, the anticipation. The powerful symbolism of running for progress.

"Runners are like the wind," he said. "There's nothing that stops them."

Kight, who has knee problems that prevent him from running, has made it his personal mission to ensure that the names of all 168 Oklahoma City bombing victims appear on the jerseys of runners in the race.

It's important to him that the victims' names live on. Seeing the names gives new life to those who died here. And it brings him incredible comfort.

"We're not going to forget the people in Boston," he said. "You can rest assured."

'We will finish this race'

If the bombing wasn't already on Hunt's mind, it would have been impossible to escape it in the early morning hours in Oklahoma City.

Helicopters circled like buzzards. Police were everywhere. A moment of silence was held for the victims -- 168 seconds for Oklahoma City; three for Boston.

And then there was the location.

The race starts where the Alfred P. Murrah building once stood -- until the bombing on April 19, 1995. The memorial to that site -- a field with one empty chair for each victim and two large metal gates, marked 9:01 and 9:03, bookending that moment in time -- butts right up against the starting line.

The race begins on the 9:03 side, a symbol of moving forward.

But it's also a reminder that tragedy can strike anywhere, anytime.

Crowds were thick as more than 25,000 runners geared up to start. Some ran in quick circles to get loose. Others leaned on each other for warmth. One man swooshed his hips around in a hula-hooping motion. (Aren't these people about to get enough exercise?) A man barked over a loudspeaker in a voice that seemed more fit for a football stadium: "We stand as one, showing the world that good always overcomes evil ..." the voice said. "We will finish this race."

Even at the start, Hunt was unwaveringly sure she could do just that.

"I have good endurance," she told me beforehand. "I don't give up on things."

She wore a "Boston Strong" sign on her stomach and her race number from the April 15 Boston Marathon on her back. Two Boston bracelets dangled on her wrist.

Her get-up attracted the attention of another Boston runner, who decided to run the start of the race by her side. It turned out both had been turned around by the blast in Boston at nearly the same time. Both offered words of encouragement, Hunt told me. Together, they vowed to cross the finish, for themselves and for Boston.

'I couldn't move'

It wasn't long before Hunt's new running mate had left her behind. She didn't take offense at that -- this was her race and she intended to run it on her own terms.

The cheers of the crowd fueled her.

About an hour into the race, Hunt ran by Terri Talley, 45, who was dumping pitcher after pitcher of a yellow sports drink into tiny paper cups. Others passed the cups to the runners. Down the road, volunteers used rakes to scrape the empty cups into piles, as if they were cleaning up leaves from an autumn yard. "Celebration" was playing on an outdoor sound system when I walked up. A woman cheered through a megaphone. Others danced with pom-poms.

She doesn't tell any of the runners about it, but Talley, a peppy woman with blond highlights in her hair and small rhinestones on the temples of her glasses, worked on the third floor of the building that was bombed in 1995.

She was buried in the rubble and nearly died.

"I couldn't move," she said. "As hard as I tried to move, I couldn't move."

Talley was coming in and out of consciousness when rescue workers found her trapped in a vertical wall of rubble and debris. All they could see, she said, was her butt, which caught their attention in part because she was wearing a suit with a loud houndstooth pattern. She jokes that it's her backside that saved her.

"I always say, 'Thank you, Mom and Dad for giving me a nice size booty,'" she told me, laughing. That's something she's only been able to do with distance.

Three rescuers stayed through a second bomb scare, she said, to pull her from the rubble when others had left the disaster site, fearing for their lives.

"When they pulled me out, I was blue and I was losing oxygen. I probably would have died if they had left me" during the second scare, she said.

She still keeps in touch with one rescuer and her ambulance driver.

Talley said she'll never put the tragedy behind her. Eighteen of her 33 coworkers at a credit union were killed that day, she said. For years, she had nightmares. Blooming trees and flowers can cause her to slide into depression.

"Everything about the month of April makes you really, really think about that. Even though it's been 18 years, it seems like not so long ago."

On Sunday, the sun was out and flowers were in bloom. But Talley was in high spirits. Seeing all these strangers running for her friends who died, and in support of her ongoing recovery, is an intense and meaningful experience.

Her advice for runners like Hunt who experienced something in Boston that may change them for a long time, if not permanently?

Keep doing marathons -- or get deeply involved in another community activity.

"Always be around a marathon," she said. "Whether you can run it or not, there's such energy from a marathon."

'I'm not in New England anymore'

Hunt's energy reserves seemed nearly exhausted around the halfway mark. It's not that she was out of fuel, but she could feel a new tightness in her legs; she figured it was residual from the marathon she ran less than two weeks before.

I caught up with her briefly between miles 17 and 18.

She had spoken with her mom on the phone a mile or so before. That was a good pick-me-up, she said. Her mom is one reason she was running in the first place.

Hunt had never run a marathon before Boston, and was able to enter that time-regulated race because she was raising money -- about $3,000 -- for cancer research and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Her mom was diagnosed with a rare, cancerous tumor on her face about two years ago, she said. The treatment was "hard to watch," she said, because it involved radiation that burned her mother's face.

Hunt also had scares with cancerous cells in her cervix a few years ago.

She had only taken up running about a year before Boston. It started with a one-mile run -- she wanted to test herself. With characteristic gusto, she ended up running more than a dozen races over the course of the year.

Hearing her story makes me believe I'll be able to complete a marathon by next year. She makes it sound so easy. You just have to commit. And then go.

She trained largely by herself, and lost more than 50 pounds in the process.

As I trotted along beside her for five or 10 minutes, I noticed she was sweating, and she told me she hadn't expected it to be this hot or hilly in Oklahoma. Temperatures topped 80 degrees that afternoon. When I found her, she was walking down a hill in a neighborhood, conserving energy and taking it slow because of the heat.

"I'm not in New England anymore," she said.

Throughout the morning, she kept hearing sirens, too.

At one point an ambulance drove by, and she covered her ears. Those noises put her back in Boston, and the panic that followed the bombs.

'You gotta pay it forward'

Early in the morning, the pack of runners looked like a pulsing river of humanity, thousands of heads bobbing down the same stream, churning in a sort of collective, perpetual energy. From afar, it looked like no individual had to expend any effort.

Anyone could do this, I thought. It's like "Finding Nemo." Just keep running.

But around the halfway point, the runners, including Hunt, had thinned out into individual dribs and drabs. It became clear that some might not make it. There were people whose feet barely looked to be leaving the ground. Others were so drenched in sweat they almost looked as though they just popped out of a lake. It was sometimes frantic and painful to watch.

It suddenly made sense why there were medic tents nearby.

Apparently some people's nipples bleed by the time they reach the finish.

Running a marathon really is no joke.

Another person I saw near mile 17 was Gary Woodbridge, 47. He said he was so tired that he had left his earphones in his ears even though his phone had lost power.

Taking out the earphones would be too much effort, he said, smiling.

Woodbridge ran with a name on his bib: Ronota Newberry-Woodbridge.

That's the wife he lost in the Oklahoma City bombing.

"She always wanted to run a marathon and I finally lost enough weight where I thought I could try," he told me before the race. "I'm not getting any younger."

Memories of her, and their runs together, occupied his thoughts.

"I'm still moving," he said. "I feel every step."

Woodbridge waited 11 days to learn his wife was dead. He spent much of that time at First Christian Church, another site on the marathon route, which became a support center for families who were in that limbo. The thing that has helped him move forward from her death is talking to other people, he said. "Your grief is going to be very unique. It's going to be very unique to you," he said. "But there are people who have been through what you've been through."

Reaching out to help others was also important for him. He has volunteered to talk to kids who have lost loved ones. And he went to New York after the 9/11 attacks.

"I was shown so much love" after the Oklahoma City bombing, he said. "You gotta pay it forward."

As I walked back to the car from that spot in the course, I saw a man on one knee in front of a lamppost, one hand on the pole and head bowed.

I assumed he was vomiting. That wouldn't have seemed out of place.

But then I realized there was a banner at the top of the pole -- one of 168 signs with a name of an Oklahoma City victim on it. I gave him some space and then asked, after he'd rejoined the runners, if Antonio "Tony" C. Reyes, the name on the banner, was someone he'd known personally. A friend? A family member?

No, he said. "That's someone I run for every year."

He ran in honor of a stranger.

'Well, run with me'

Hunt found a bigger challenge at the 20-mile mark.

Before the race, she had insisted on not knowing the course route.

"If it's a hill, it's a hill," she said. "I'll have to run it.

So no one had told her that the last several miles of the Oklahoma City marathon course go gradually uphill toward the finish line.

Discouraged by the heat and the elevation changes, Hunt started walking again. The pain of the race was setting in. Maybe her legs weren't invincible after all.

But a woman from Tennessee came to her rescue.

She approached her and asked about the Boston number on her back. Hunt told her the story: the training, the bombing, the disappointment. And the fear. How it was too soon for even a serious marathoner to be running a race again.

How she was really just a beginner.

"She was like, 'well, run with me,'" Hunt recalled.

"It definitely helped."

So did the cheers from anonymous fans.

Soon, Hunt was approaching the mile-marker in the race where the bomb went off in Boston, when she saw the cloud of smoke rising from the city and the runners frantically turning the other direction and running in panic, fearing for their lives.

Instead of being afraid, she felt motivated.

"Once I hit the point where I stopped in Boston, I was like, 'No more walking. I'm running this. This race, this is for Boston. I'm finishing.'"

'On top of the world'

I saw Hunt on the home stretch, headed for the core of downtown Oklahoma City, with a smile plastered across her face. Fans stood on both sides of Broadway Avenue, ringing cowbells, shouting "woo!!" and "you got it!!" and "let's go!!!" All of that stuff would seem annoyingly over-energized on any normal Sunday morning. But here it was infectious. I found myself joining in, cheering hardest for the people who were walking or jogging the slowest, those who looked like they would barely make it. I saw one man stop to vomit and then continue toward the finish. I mean, wow.

No one seemed concerned about bombs or terror.

"We all run for a reason here!" an announcer said. "We run to remember!"

Hunt said she left the traumatic memories mostly behind on that last stretch.

When she crossed the finish line, after having that experience robbed from her in Boston, and knowing that so many people had so much more taken from them on that day, she threw her arms into the air. Tears came to her eyes, but she quickly wiped them away. She's too tough for that. "When I saw (the finish) I couldn't stop running," she said. "Even though I was dying, I wanted to keep going."

She added: "I'm on top of the world right now."

The thing that kept her moving was the aid of complete strangers.

'A step in her healing'

Earlier in the week, before the marathon, I met with Ernestine Clark, 69, who was in a library near the Murrah Building when it was bombed. I'd read about her story online and was amazed by the steps she'd taken to create something positive out of a horrifying experience.

I wanted to learn something from her about paying it forward. I thought it might help with my Run for Boston project, which essentially is trying to bring strangers together to support the people of that community.

And I also thought it might help Hunt.

Clark greeted me at her door with a smile on Saturday morning, wearing pearl earrings and red glasses. We talked for a while in her living room and then she told me she wanted to show me something in her backyard, which is well gardened and is filled with the soothing clang of wind chimes.

It was an elm, taller than her house.

She told me it grew from a tiny sapling from the survivor tree at the bombing site.

She put a metal sign at the base of the tree, explaining its origins -- that this tree grew out of tragedy and was now probably the best and sturdiest plant in the yard. When she dies and the house goes to someone else, she said, she wants the new buyer to know about the tree. That way, if he or she cuts it down, they'll know they're going straight to hell, she told me, laughing wildly.

Clark told me about the nightmares she had after the bombing. They lasted for three years. Many nights she dreamed she knew of an imminent bomb attack, but that she was unable to evacuate or warn people in time. She worked in the Oklahoma City library at the time of the bombing. It shattered the window and blew her out of a room and into a hallway. She told me how she staggered around downtown in a daze. All the buildings seemed like they were bending toward her.

"At times, I felt I was crazy," she told me. "I would look into the mirror and I would just not know who that person was. It took me down to the quick."

In an experience that parallels Hunt's, Clark once jumped under a table at dinner when the restaurant's air conditioner popped on suddenly. Shattering a drinking glass once brought her to tears. It reminded her of the glass that was broken in the bombing, that stuck in the sides of the survivor tree, and that made its way between the pages of many of the library's books.

When she couldn't sleep, Clark made a pact with another survivor to go sit in the dark at the bombing memorial downtown, where the OKC marathon begins.

They would sit in the dark in silence holding hands.

Just for comfort. Just to be there.

She also wrote. She bought her first computer after the bombing and she told that machine about what she had seen in 1995 before she could tell another person.

Clark isn't able to walk well enough to go to the marathon these days, but she was instrumental in planning and shaping the memorial that it commemorates. She's been a quiet but adamant representative for victims of the tragedy and their families.

I told Clark a little bit about Hunt, the runner from Connecticut. How she wanted to finish what she'd started. How she was looking for answers in this city. Clark said the Oklahoma City marathon "will be a step in her healing."

"There will be many, many more," she said.

And then she said something kind of amazing.

She offered to help a stranger.

It's something she's done many times. She received letters from all over the country after the Oklahoma City bombing. Talking to strangers shortly after the blast was easier than speaking to her own family members, she said. They brought her comfort. They helped her get to the point where she could join society again.

She's done a great deal to pay that back. She visited Cameroon to meet with people who live in a village that was decimated by a volcanic eruption in the 1980s. She befriended her translator there and eventually helped him earn a scholarship to attend graduate school at her alma mater, Oklahoma State University.

She wrote letters to people in Columbine. After the Boston Marathon bombing, she encouraged church members to make a sign showing support for the victims. They sent it to another church of the same denomination in Boston.

"The day of the Boston Marathon, that just put me in a deep hole," she said. "I cried all day. (Tragedies like that) can throw you back there.

"The difference is, after 18 years, I can pull myself out of it."

When I mentioned Hunt, she didn't hesitate to say that if the young woman from the Boston area ever needs to talk to someone, she should get her number from me and give her a call.

After all, what are strangers for?

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LOL isn't funny anymore

John McWhorter: People see the language of texting as a sign of bad writing He says the evolution of the phrase "LOL" shows how texting is a new form of communication Once a sign of humor, now "LOL" is a way of indicating empathy, he says McWhorter: Texting isn't corrupting the way we communicate; it's enhancing it

Editor's note: John McWhorter teaches linguistics, American studies and Western civilization at Columbia University and is contributing editor for The New Republic and a columnist for The New York Daily News. His latest book is "What Language Is (and What It Isn't and What It Could Be)." He spoke at the TED2013 conference in February. TED is a nonprofit dedicated to "Ideas worth spreading," which it makes available through talks posted on its website.

(CNN) -- The going idea is that texting has, in essence, made graffiti a universal pastime: Barely punctuated, sparsely capitalized and with decidedly creative spellings throughout, texting means that today's America is reveling in writing badly.

Ten years ago (we'll soon get to why it would only be back then) the proper answer to this would have been LOL -- "laughing out loud" -- because in reality, texting is sprouting new grammar all the time. Yes, grammar, as subtle and sophisticated as subjunctives and such.

Take LOL. Today, it wouldn't signify amusement the way it did when it first caught on. Jocelyn texts "where have you been?" and Annabelle texts back "LOL at the library studying for two hours."

John McWhorter

How funny is that, really? Or an exchange such as "LOL theres only one slice left" / "don't deprive me LOL" -- text exchanges often drip with these LOL's the way normal writing drips with commas. Let's face it -- no mentally composed human being spend his or her entire life immersed in ceaseless hilarity. The LOLs must mean something else.

They do. They signal basic empathy between texters. What began as signifying laughter morphed into easing tension and creating a sense of equality.

Watch John McWhorter's TED Talk

Linguist: Texting isn't killing language

That is, "LOL" no longer "means" anything. Rather, it "does something" -- conveying an attitude -- just as the ending "-ed" doesn't "mean" anything but conveys past tense. LOL is, of all things, grammar.

Of course, no texter thinks about that consciously. But then most of communication operates below the radar, where things tend not to mean what they would literally. Over time, the meaning of a word or an expression drifts. "Meat" used to mean any kind of food. "Silly" used to mean, believe it or not, blessed.

We can see LOL-type expressions happening in speech.

"I know, right?" means little; it assures the listener of agreement and acknowledgment. Or, there is the phrase "You know what I'm sayin'?" used most in what is best known as "Ebonics," but increasingly by young people of various shades and demographics.

TED.com: Q&A with John McWhorter

Technically, it is composed of seven words: do, you, know, what, I, am, and saying. However, it is now more often pronounced as two syllables -- "noam sayin'?" -- or sometimes even just a single one, roughly: "Msehn?"

It, too, is now a piece of grammar, soliciting the same sense of empathy and group membership that LOL does. LOL is one of several texting expressions that convey nuance in a system where you don't have the voice and face to do it the way you normally would.

Civilization, then, is fine. People banging away on their smartphones are fluently using a code separate from the one they use in actual writing, but a code it is, to which linguists are currently devoting articles.

People have been warning us that language was going to the dogs ever since Latin started turning into French. Yet the dogs in question never seem to emerge yelping on the horizon.

TED.com: Steven Pinker on what our language habits reveal

There is no evidence that texting is ruining composition skills. Worldwide, people speak differently than they write, and texting -- quick, casual and only intended to be read once -- is actually a way of talking with your fingers.

All indications are that America's youth are doing it quite well. Texting is not the mangling of language -- it's the birth of a new one.

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First rocket flight for Virgin Galactic

Virgin Galactic: First rocket-powered test flight completed for SpaceShipTwo Test was not a space flight, but company says it anticipates space flight by year's end The aircraft broke the sound barrier during propulsion, Virgin Galactic says

(CNN) -- Virgin Galactic is one flight closer to becoming a commercial "spaceline." The company's passenger spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, completed its first rocket-powered flight Monday morning above the Mojave Desert in California.

About 45 minutes into the flight, SpaceShipTwo was released from its carrier craft, WhiteKnightTwo. Ignition of the rocket motor was triggered, carrying SpaceShipTwo to a maximum altitude of 56,000 feet. During the 16-second engine burn, the spaceship broke the sound barrier, according to a statement from Virgin Galactic.

The rocket-powered portion of the flight lasted a little more than 10 minutes, and the entire flight took about an hour. The flight was not a space flight. Virgin Galactic said it will continue testing this year and plans to reach full space flight by the end of 2013.

"For the first time, we were able to prove the key components of the system," said Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson in a statement. Branson was in the Mojave Desert for the flight.

2012: Branson taking people into space

"Today's supersonic success opens the way for rapid expansion of the spaceship's powered flight envelope, with a very realistic goal of full space flight by the year's end."

More than 500 would-be space tourists have signed up to take short $200,000 flights that would involve several minutes of weightlessness.