How We React

...to the event is what's important now.

From Bruce Schneier at The Atlantic:

As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it'd be easy to be scared. It'd be easy to feel powerless and demand that our elected leaders do something -- anything -- to keep us safe.

It'd be easy, but it'd be wrong. We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right into the perpetrators' hands -- and magnify the power of their victory for whichever goals whatever group behind this, still to be uncovered, has. We don't have to be scared, and we're not powerless. We actually have all the power here, and there's one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized.

It's hard to do, because terrorism is designed precisely to scare people -- far out of proportion to its actual danger. A huge amount of research on fear and the brain teaches us that we exaggerate threats that are rare, spectacular, immediate, random -- in this case involving an innocent child -- senseless, horrific and graphic. Terrorism pushes all of our fear buttons, really hard, and we overreact.

Note to the terrorists/nutballs/wingnuts/whatever:

You're not going to make me close myself off from the world.  I won't be cowering in a Safe Room behind doors and windows sealed up with plastic sheets and duct tape.

I sure as hell don't get everything right every time, but I claim the right to keep trying; to go on stumbling forward; and you're not going get me to strangle myself in a security blanket just because you don't have enough hair on your sack to look me in the eye and call me out on the shit you don't agree with.

I live my life, and I do my little FreedomThing out in the open where everybody can see it.  You don't like it?  Well here I am, asshole.  Come and get me.

And oh yeah - almost forgot - there's 300 million of me, so fuck you.