The world absolutely is a smaller place — much smaller — than it was even five years ago. The internet. Facebook. Twitter. News travels fast, even if it is not always accurate.

A call from the office a bit after 11 p.m. alerted us to the reports of explosions near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, where it was 3 p.m. in the afternoon.

And we spent the next couple of hours watching CNN and reading online reports as the first early facts began to come out.

A couple of thoughts:

–The world is a dangerous place, and we here in the UAE live close to several dangerous places (Yemen and Iran come to mind, Pakistan), but inside the UAE, the threat of terror is very low.

A kid throwing a battery charger and striking a soccer linesman, drawing blood, last weekend, was such a rare act of public mayhem that it produced a national debate about how to deal with the issue. (And an editorial in The National.)

–We have a sense that events like the Boston Marathon bombing, which killed at least three, and the chance that it was inspired by Islamic militants, lead people back in the States to believe we who are living here in the Gulf are at risk every day.

And maybe we are naive/foolish (Iran may be cooking up a nuclear weapon just across the Strait of Hormuz) … but the UAE seems safer, in many ways, than the U.S.  Al Qaeda is unlikely to attack the UAE. It’s just how the geopolitics of it work out. Sunni militants generally will not target a Sunni country.

–This is the sort of story that sets off debates in the newsroom here about giving significant coverage to a handful of people being killed in the U.S., versus another 50-plus who were killed by bombs in Iraq on the same day. Are some lives worth more attention than others?

In this case, the skew towards Boston can be defended.

The most recent successful attack by Islamic militants on the U.S. was on September 11, 2001, and it set off a series of events that led to long U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. For that reason, what certainly looks like terror in Boston — of some sort, perhaps domestic — makes everyone around here a little jumpier and raises at least the possibility of military action.

People in the UAE are trying to lead peaceful, largely uneventful lives. Just as they are in the U.S.

At the moment, it seems like residents here have a better chance of avoiding violence than do those “safe” at home in the States.