How to Respond to Boston Attack: Do Nothing

The Boston Celtics play the New York Knicks in the playoffs this weekend, and fans from these two cities hit by terrorism will surely unite in a stirring display of patriotism. But at Salon, Alex Pareene is also hoping for a "healthy amount of booing, vulgar heckling," and all the usual animosity that fans from Boston and New York like to bestow on one another. Why? "That will be a return to normalcy and a message that this asshole didn’t accomplish a damn thing." Helping Boston—and the nation—get back to normal is the best possible response to the attack, he writes.

What he'd like to see happen next: "Americans as a whole do nothing, besides find and punish the person responsible." He argues that "if we acknowledge that terrorism isn’t an existential threat to the American way of life, or to our freedom, or anything else, we can take reasonable steps to mitigate the threat without freaking out and, say, getting every flight with people who look Middle Eastern grounded, banning backpacks from public spaces, or launching any wars." There's no way we could hope to stop every idiot with a homemade bomb, but those idiots shouldn't change the way we live, either. Let the cops do their job—as for the rest of us, "we have lives to live." Click for the full column. (More Boston Marathon bombing stories.)