They clearly don’t know us. And that’s to their disadvantage. One imagines they fancy themselves tactically competent, and militarily able. But if they won’t, or can’t, know their enemy—us, the people and nation they’ve chosen for their enemy—then they are tactically nothing, military nonstarters. They’re destined to lose whatever gambit they’ve opened, but not before reaping what they have sown.
Somehow they’ve missed this simple fact: We are Boston.
Boston is the seat and cradle of our democracy. It’s where the American ideal was first dreamt about, then longed for, then seized and held against all who would debase it. Boston was our bridgehead, figuratively and literally. It’s where we stepped away from the Old World, and created a new one.
Boston is what we cherish and protect. Not because it carries echoes of the optimism of our founding — or at least not only for that reason; but also because it carries that optimism forward, reminding us all and always to keep creating a future worthy of our past.
Whoever attacked Boston has wounded us all, but that’s all they can do. In wounding us, they’ve created two new dynamics, both to their detriment: They’ve united us, again, in ways that our own internal processes can never seem to do. And they’ve turned our fury and attention in their direction.
Whoever attacked Boston will be found out, and hunted to their end. Boston will be their swan-song. We will see to it that they’ll hurt no one else.
While that happens, let us all be Americans and Bostonians. Let us learn from the past, when we allowed wounds like these to tear us apart. Let us resolve to never again compromise the values that Boston helped create for us.
We carry forward, without fear. Without overreaction. We do what we must to bring justice to craven bombers, but that doesn’t consume us or define us.
Instead, we live our lives gloriously. We go on building the world Boston incubated for us. We stand in the sunshine, holding the hands of our children, sparing little thought and no disquiet for the shadow-men who only want to make us afraid.
Next year, we’ll run the Boston Marathon joyfully, and right on schedule. We are Boston and they can’t change that.
