Boston

Note: I've disabled comments for this post, which is something I have never before done.  However, this is not intended to be a political argument, and I do not wish it to become one in the comments section. Hug your loved ones today. Let's all let the best of us outshine the very worst the world has to offer. - BJ

As you’ve no doubt learned by now, yesterday a cowardly, weak man or group of men attacked my city. As of this writing, well over one hundred injuries have been reported, and at least three people have been killed.

One of those three was an eight year old boy.

Across the internet yesterday, I saw remarkable acts of generosity and kindness – the kind of things Bostonians have not previously been known for, but will now be. Just as we welcomed thousands of strangers into our city to run in our marathon, so did we offer up our homes to those strangers when they had no other place to go when terrorists attacked our home.

We are stronger than those evil attackers, whose ideas, lacking the power of persuasion and thus only saleable through violence, could have possibly believed.

As this investigation stretches on as it may for days or weeks or years, we must remain as strong in our resolve, in the inherent goodness we have demonstrated on this dark day. It would be easy, so very easy, to stray from this goodness. Across the internet yesterday, from friends and acquaintances and absolute strangers, I also saw calls for the immediate death of those responsible upon their discovery. I saw people clamoring for vengeance from a place of hurt, and anger, and, of course, terror.

I get it. I have no idea what I would do if I happened to be the person to come across these small-minded, stupid, violent, and weak individuals who killed an eight year old boy. In mycity. In the place I have called home even when I wasn’t living there.  This is the place where my daughter was born, where most of the truly monumental events in my life have occurred. If I had my hands on these wicked, subhuman pieces of offal, you can bet I’d want to be the one to see them dead. I’d want to reach my hands through their chests and squeeze their worthless hearts until whatever souls they have moved on to their eternal torment, but not before I caused them some real hurting first.  I really get it.

And this is exactly why we can not react this way. These terrorists, they don’t deserve a trial. But we do.

We can not let the the worst that these cowards have to offer overwhelm the best that we are. We can not let their act of terror force us to act as though we have been terrorized. We need to shine the light of day on these weak, pathetic men and show the world how very little terror they have the power to sow. We deserve the grand sight of these worthless people handcuffed and dragged into the courthouse, hiding their faces from the cameras – and by extension the people they have failed to break with their violence – and we deserve to know that they are no better than any other common murderer we drag into those courthouses to face the justice they have earned. We deserve to know that they are languishing behind bars for the rest of their worthless lives, without redemption, unable to break the system they have attacked.

These cowards deserve none of it. They deserve slow and painful deaths. They deserve to feel every second of the anguish their victims have felt and will continue to feel. They deserve our worst. When they get our best, though – when see every day they how they were unable to break our core principles with their act of terror – that will be the torment they will live with for a long, miserable, and just time.

And in this, we will persevere. Next year, we will open our city again to the world, and thousands of people will run in triumph, embraced by their loved ones and strangers alike as they cross the very line which yesterday divided the worst of humanity and the best of humanity. We will remember what happened yesterday.  We will mark this grim anniversary with a celebration, and somewhere, in a tiny, windowless cell, the bastards who did this will watch, and hear, and see exactly what they failed to accomplish while they spend the next many years waiting for the death that we refused to give them in our agony. And we will have won.