Bruce Schneier is an acclaimed security expert whose commentary has informed much of my own thinking on what we ought to be doing in response to terrorism, and why much of what we have done has been pointless, if not downright harmful (e.g., the entire ridiculous kabuki act we have to endure to get on an airplane these days). He’s written an essay for The Atlantic in response to the Marathon bombings that I think ought to be required reading for everyone in the country. Definitely click the link and peruse the whole thing — don’t worry, it’s not very long — but here are the highlights:

Terrorism, even the terrorism of radical Islamists and right-wing extremists and lone actors all put together, is not an “existential threat” against our nation. Even the events of 9/11, as horrific as they were, didn’t do existential damage to our nation. Our society is more robust than it might seem from watching the news. We need to start acting that way. 

 

There are things we can do to make us safer, mostly around investigation, intelligence, and emergency response, but we will never be 100-percent safe from terrorism; we need to accept that. 

 

How well this attack succeeds depends much less on what happened in Boston than by our reactions in the coming weeks and months. Terrorism isn’t primarily a crime against people or property. It’s a crime against our minds, using the deaths of innocents and destruction of property as accomplices. When we react from fear, when we change our laws and policies to make our country less open, the terrorists succeed, even if their attacks fail. But when we refuse to be terrorized, when we’re indomitable in the face of terror, the terrorists fail, even if their attacks succeed. 

 

Don’t glorify the terrorists and their actions by calling this part of a “war on terror.” Wars involve two legitimate sides. There’s only one legitimate side here; those on the other are criminals. They should be found, arrested, and punished. But we need to be vigilant not to weaken the very freedoms and liberties that make this country great, meanwhile, just because we’re scared. 

In other words, as tiresome and cliche’d as the expression has become in the past few years, keep calm and carry on. It’s what I wish we’d collectively done 12 years ago instead of what we did do (the PATRIOT Act, the Iraq War, Gitmo, torture). It’s what we seem to be doing now. I hope I’m right…

My first thoughts were of my old friend Andy and his wife Krickett. I met both of them during my Cinemark days, when I was working at that multiplex movie theater I reminisce about all the time. Andy was an usher, a skinny kid with hair so meticulously combed and gelled that we used to tease him about being an android (or, as the android character Bishop in Aliens dubs himself, an “artificial person”), because no natural human could possibly have had such perfect hair. Krickett was a candy girl. I imagine they probably call them “concessionists” or some other politely neutral term these days, and I’ve noticed there’s no longer a gender-based distinction in theater jobs as there was in my day, when boys were ushers and girls were behind the counter. But just keep in mind that my day was the Pleistocene, and all the way back then, in the dim mists of pre-history, we had candy girls. Anyway, Krickett was cute and vivacious and kinda-sorta resembled Julia Roberts, back when the whole world had a crush on Julia Roberts. She and Andy were almost immediately besotted with each other. Hopelessly besotted. They were also very young, just 16 I think, and being a wise old jaded cynic at the age of twentysomething, I honestly didn’t think they were going to last.

I lost track of Andy and Krickett for a long time after I finally left the projection booth for good, but of course I eventually came across the two of them on Facebook, as you inevitably do in the 21st century, and I was pleased to learn I’d been wrong about them. It turned out their teenage romance had had a happy ending after all. They got married, had some kids, and are still together and still happy after two decades. As it happens, Andy has become a long-distance runner in that time and — I’m sure you can see where this is going — he was in the Boston Marathon yesterday, fulfilling one of his “bucket list” goals. On his wife’s birthday, no less. So when news of the explosions came flashing across the InterWebs, my immediate reaction was to hope the two of them were safe.

They were, thankfully. Andy checked in with me later in the afternoon and reported that he had already completed the race and they were both back at their hotel when the bombs went off. I felt a surprising amount of relief, considering I haven’t actually seen either of them in the flesh since Jurassic Park was in theaters the first time.

I’m also relieved to see that, so far anyway, the country doesn’t seem to be going bananas over this. The Marathon bombings were an obvious act of terrorism, and in the minds of many people, that means Muslims. I read this morning that every major Muslim group in America has already issued press releases condemning the attack, essentially trying to pre-empt the hysteria that inevitably gets directed their way following a terrorist attack. It depresses me that these groups feel it necessary to do this, but I understand why they do. Personally, I think it’s just as likely what happened in Boston yesterday was perpetrated by some self-proclaimed “patriot,” a white, Christian, anti-government, Timothy McVeigh-type protesting against income taxes or something. (It strikes me as significant that yesterday was April 15, tax deadline day.) Or it could have been a nondescript nutbag with no particular cause at all, other than to hurt some people and create mayhem. We just don’t know yet. But regardless of who the eventual suspect(s) turn(s) out to be, it gladdens me that I’m not encountering a lot of paranoid, xenophobic, reactionary chatter online. In fact, other than pro bloggers and news sites, I’m not seeing a lot of chatter about the bombings at all. People are tweeting and blogging and Facebooking about the same old stuff… movies and hobbies and jobs and family, what they had for lunch and what funny things are happening to them. Normal life. Could it be that finally, twelve years after everything changed on 9/11, we’re finally beginning to heed the wisdom of that old slogan, “Keep calm and carry on?” Maybe so. (Of course, there could be lots of chatter happening that I’m not seeing due to what I personally choose to follow online. I prefer to think otherwise, though.)

I don’t have much else to say about this whole terrible event. What is there to say, really? Any remaining sentiments of mine were already better expressed by the comedian Patton Oswalt anyhow. The comments he posted on Facebook yesterday have already been disseminated far and wide, but they’re so eloquent, so on-target, that I’m going to repeat them here as well, just in case somebody reading this hasn’t seen them yet:

Boston. Fucking horrible.

 

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, “Well, I’ve had it with humanity.”

 

But I was wrong. I don’t know what’s going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.

 

But here’s what I DO know. If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we’re lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they’re pointed towards darkness.

 

But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago.

 

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, “The good outnumber you, and we always will.”

Amen, brother.

As part of the New and Improved Lifestyle I’ve tried to establish over the past year, I’ve been taking afternoon walks every day, workflow permitting. Most days I seem to end up wandering through the Avenues, one of Salt Lake’s oldest residential neighborhoods, which is little more than stone’s-throw from my office. It’s a lovely place for a stroll, with lots of big trees and an eclectic mix of housing styles: turreted Victorians, cozy bungalows, mid-century ramblers, even a few art-deco apartment buildings.

I was up there earlier today, in fact, walking through a steady rain with one hand jammed deep into my pocket and the other growing cold on my umbrella handle. I could smell the faint but distinctive odor given off by my leather jacket when it gets wet, and water was seeping through cracks in the soles of my worn-out sneakers. A pretty young thing on a bicycle smiled at me as she rolled past, a tiny diamond stud winking from the side of her nose while raindrops glittered in the thick, flat braid of chestnut hair that ran down the center of her back.

My iPod chose that moment to summon an Allman Brothers tune, one that sounds cheerful on the surface but always evokes an unaccountable bittersweet feeling in me, and it occurred to me that if I kept walking in this direction long enough, I’d end up on the campus of my alma mater, the University of Utah. And suddenly my head filled with half-remembered emotions and half-forgotten ambitions, the flavor of a time in my life 25 years past. I found myself thinking of other springtime rainstorms, of a girl who meant everything to me until the day she didn’t, of stories I’ve never written and places I haven’t gotten around to visiting.

Then I had the weirdest sensation that my younger self was nearby, not just metaphorically but in close physical proximity, as if he was walking along this same sidewalk, beneath these same trees, smelling and sensing all the things I was, but separated from me by some kind of membrane. Something permeable enough to detect a presence on the other side, but unbreakable. A time barrier, I suppose, if we want to get all Doctor Who-ish. I could feel his restlessness, his idealism, his curiosity about the world and his naive certainty that he’d someday get everything he wanted, just because he was him. I wondered if somehow he could feel me too, and what, specifically, of me he felt. My disappointments and regrets? My banal middle-aged anxieties about health and money and getting old too soon? Would he even recognize me as the person he was to become, or would I just seem like a stranger to him?

To be honest, sometimes, when I’m walking in the rain, I seem like a stranger to myself…

I shared my train ride into work this morning with a platoon of third-graders on a field trip from their suburban elementary school to the Clark Planetarium downtown. Normally, any scenario in which I’m shut up inside a metal box with 60 excitedly chattering eight-year-olds would leave me huddled in a corner, rocking back and forth, and muttering nonstop profanities aimed at a universe that could be so cruel and indifferent. Today’s experience, however, wasn’t that bad. Today my irritation was offset by amusement at one particular little boy and girl sitting across the aisle from me.

The boy was bending the ear of an adult woman — a teacher maybe, or perhaps a PTA mom, but definitely someone with the group who shared some level of intimacy with the boy — holding forth in a very intense manner about all the things he does not eat. First on the list were peanuts, which his sister is allergic to. If she were to eat one, her throat would close up and she would most likely die within seconds (this is a pretty close approximation of the boy’s actual words, incidentally; in addition to being terribly solemn and intense for his age, he was also surprisingly eloquent). Because of this danger, there are no peanuts in his home, and that is fine by him, because he does not like them. (He virtually spat out the words describing his distaste for the humble but potentially sororicidal goober.) He then went on to enumerate numerous other foods which do not pass his personal muster, spelling out in great detail exactly what he dislikes about each, then pausing after each mini-rant to let the steam rebuild before launching himself anew.

As I eavesdropped on this overwhelmingly one-sided conversation, I had a sudden, very clear impression of this boy as a crotchety old man, leaning on his cane, maybe slapping a Formica table-top (or whatever synthetic surface they’re using on tables 70 years from now) for emphasis, haranguing some poor waitress or nursing-home aide with exactly the same opinions he was spewing today. I am certain I saw exactly what this boy will someday be like, and it was exactly what he is right now.

That vision made me smirk a bit. But what really pulled a smile out of me was the little girl sitting beside him. While the grown-up woman was nodding and saying encouraging but vaguely disconnected things like “uh-huh” — as you do when a child is babbling at you and you’re really not paying attention — the boy’s classmate was making a supreme effort to ignore him, staring out the window with the intensity of a hawk on a telephone pole watching for a kangaroo rat. However, she couldn’t block him out entirely, and would occasionally glance at him as if to try and determine if he was finished yet. Then he’d start complaining again and she’d turn back to the scenery. On one of these occasions, I saw her make an impatient little hand gesture and roll her eyes, and I could practically hear her thinking to herself, “oh, please.” And I saw then exactly what she was going to be like as an old woman.

People never really change that much, in my opinion. It seems to me that our basic temperament and personality is locked in pretty early, and even though we do change and grow over time, there is a core part of us that is what it is. Sometimes, when you look at a child, you can see it. You know what the eight-year-old will be like when they’re eighty. And sometimes, when you look at an eighty-year-old, you see the eight-year-old they must’ve once been.

Those two kids are probably going to end up married, you know.