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The Marathon Bombing
Apr. 15th, 2013 09:23 pmI was going to write about various minutiae, but after today's events, I don't see how I could.
How to begin: I'm safe and unharmed, so is Julie, so is everyone else I know.
I want to say "keep calm and carry on", but it's easy for me to say when I didn't suffer personally. Those who were injured, who were first-hand witness to the brutality of the attack, those who lost friends and family, for those people, fear and despair are completely understandable reactions. Yet I still selfishly hope that they, too, will assert that terrorists may take lives, may cause grievous harm, may destroy things that we hold dear, but the only humanity they can destroy is their own.
I take some comfort in the fact that terrorists are incompetent, cowardly, and generally ineffective, while hoping that a free society could continue to be free in the face of the most effective attacks that evil people could theoretically muster. But I still hope this isn't the end of the post-9/11 trend that actually happened and the start of the post-9/11 trend everyone feared (indiscriminate attacks on numerous and undefendable "soft targets").
I hope we will remember that terrorists are the small demons of modern society. They have a hard time causing as much death and destruction as, say, traffic accidents, though they cause it in a way that's much more horrifying and gruesome and depraved. Thwarting and incapacitating terrorists is crucial, but when it comes to measures taken to increase safety, we need to remember that safety is a means to freedom, not an end in itself.
Today, the marathoners accomplished a feat worthy of praise. I say, and I hope, that the terrorists accomplished nothing.
How to begin: I'm safe and unharmed, so is Julie, so is everyone else I know.
I want to say "keep calm and carry on", but it's easy for me to say when I didn't suffer personally. Those who were injured, who were first-hand witness to the brutality of the attack, those who lost friends and family, for those people, fear and despair are completely understandable reactions. Yet I still selfishly hope that they, too, will assert that terrorists may take lives, may cause grievous harm, may destroy things that we hold dear, but the only humanity they can destroy is their own.
I take some comfort in the fact that terrorists are incompetent, cowardly, and generally ineffective, while hoping that a free society could continue to be free in the face of the most effective attacks that evil people could theoretically muster. But I still hope this isn't the end of the post-9/11 trend that actually happened and the start of the post-9/11 trend everyone feared (indiscriminate attacks on numerous and undefendable "soft targets").
I hope we will remember that terrorists are the small demons of modern society. They have a hard time causing as much death and destruction as, say, traffic accidents, though they cause it in a way that's much more horrifying and gruesome and depraved. Thwarting and incapacitating terrorists is crucial, but when it comes to measures taken to increase safety, we need to remember that safety is a means to freedom, not an end in itself.
Today, the marathoners accomplished a feat worthy of praise. I say, and I hope, that the terrorists accomplished nothing.
