Some have suggested that Boston might be our terrorist future (as in the IED comes to America). If so, it will be more because of how we reacted to it than because of the attack itself.
For days after those two bombs went off, just about everything in Boston and the surrounding environs was shut down out of fear-understandable fear perhaps, but fear nonetheless.
But whatever relevance Franklin Roosevelt’s admonition that “all we have to fear is fear itself” may have had for the Great Depression, there is no doubt that it applies to terrorism.
We missed an opportunity in the days immediately following 9/11. That opportunity, which would have done so much to advance the cause of human decency in the face of evil, was for all of us to go out and get on an airplane to somewhere, even if we had nowhere special to go. For only by such a reaction can we foil the goal of terrorists, which is to induce fear and force us to change the way we live.
Terrorists commit brutal acts of violence against random victims in order to provoke an overreaction. The way to defeat it is therefore to respond in such a fashion as to prove that we are not afraid, that we will not be cowed.
To the extent that we become paralyzed by fear we lose. To the extent that we refuse to be afraid, the terrorists lose because they are denied their primary objective.
Put differently, we should never allow ourselves to be manipulated into playing by the terrorists’ rules.
Despite all of the many things that we have done right since 9/11, one senses there was always the broader mistake of placing terrorism at the top of our national political agenda, a position its degree of threat never justified, with an accompanying level of attention it never deserved.
Which is another way of saying that our response to 9/11 hurt us far more than 9/11 itself.
Yes, we had few alternatives at the time but to seek to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan, which had provided sanctuary to al-Qaida in such a way as to violate all strictures of international law and make 9/11 possible. And yes, there were plenty of good reasons to topple Saddam Hussein, a major state sponsor of international terrorism, as a significant step in the struggle thereafter.
But it still seems, nearly 12 years on, that we have failed to learn the larger lesson, which is that the key to defeating terrorism is not just to kill terrorists (although that is most certainly helpful and necessary) but to also deny their objectives, foremost of which is to provoke us.
A great American city was locked down for days. A major airport closed. Over 130 public schools and prominent universities shut down.
The nation was transfixed, with the president given constant updates on the smallest details of the manhunt, and supposed experts on terrorism were all over our television screens telling us, apparently with no sense of irony, that terrorism thrives on attracting media attention.
And all because two pieces of human excrement planted two bombs at an athletic event. If their goal was to disrupt the rhythms of our daily lives, they succeeded and then some, not so much by what they did, but how we reacted to it.
It was as if the entire world outside Boston suddenly disappeared. Several times more people died in an explosion in a fertilizer plant two days later in Texas than in Boston, but we hardly noticed. The possibility of war on the Korean peninsula, which would likely kill many more people in the first few hours than all the terrorist attacks of the past century combined, somehow no longer concerned us.
The problem with all this, with the manner in which we rewarded terrorism by giving it so much of the attention it craves, is that we have unwittingly provided incentives for it to be repeated.
What if other nutcases out there, inspired by jihad or simply a desire for their moment of media fame, decide to plant a couple of bombs in trash cans somewhere in the Chicago Loop, perhaps followed the next week by Denver International Airport, and then perhaps along Hollywood Boulevard?
Where, exactly, would that leave us?
Perhaps more troubling still, what have the post-bin Laden elements of al-Qaida learned from Boston? Would they not suddenly realize that an easier way to paralyze the Great Satan is to shift away from more ambitious 9/11-style attacks and take a page out of the Tsarnaev brothers’ playbook instead?
So let us step back and think this all through with an eye toward the future, and with an understanding of what terrorists want and how to avoid giving it to them. Yes, we should be saddened over what happened in Boston, and appropriately grateful that the perpetrators will have had justice of some sort visited upon them.
But we also need to remember that there are far more dangerous terrorists out there who have been watching and learning from the havoc and panic caused among us by Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
So what should we then do? Maybe find that marathon to run in.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial, Pages 11 on 04/29/2013