Was there ever any bottom line accounting for how much the Boston Marathon Bombing cost last year?
We have heard figures of $300 million or more, just for April 19, 2013, that one day the Boston area shut down while police searched for the surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
We are not sure anyone really knows.
Of course, some things can’t be tallied with a dollar sign. The lives taken or shattered by death or injury are priceless. Those things can’t be undone.
What we do know is all that damage, the blood, the terror, and the chaos, was caused by two half-cocked yahoos with jury-rigged backpacks. If 9/11 showed what could happen when trained operatives follow a plan with ruthless precision, Boston showed what can happen anytime someone is motivated to do something incredibly stupid.
On the one-year anniversary of the bombing, the eyes of the nation are turning toward Beantown as it prepares to host one of the great marathons in the world next week.
Like others, we hope for the best, but we fear for the worst. A marathon is 26.2 miles long. Police officers could literally stand shoulder-to-shoulder along the entire route and there are still thousands of chances for chaos.
There are just too many people, too many miles, too many opportunities for mayhem. This is not to play up the terror angle modern media seems to fully embrace when it comes to reporting the news, this is a reminder that we need to be prepared, that we can take all the precautions we want, but there is always the possibility bad things will happen to good people.
You could literally devote every second of your life to safety and caution, obsessively minimize or avoid every risk before you and you can never entirely eliminate the possibility a random piano will fall on your head. You never know.
Which makes it all the more important to get back in the race again. It is said that once we abandon the way we live our lives, once we let fear control us, the terrorists win. We are comfortable letting the police and military do the heavy lifting to keep us safe.
For our part, we have to get on with our lives, and part of that is embracing the risk of living freely, here, there, and everywhere.
All the things we tell ourselves about living our lives as freedom-loving Americans go out the window if we don’t. Yes, something bad might happen but if we don’t do anything to move forward, it’s assured that nothing good will happen.
There are no easy answers.
