The Admirably Calm Response to Boston

“Boston bombings shatter a national sense of safety,” read one headline this morning. “A perfect Marathon day, then the unimaginable,” read another. These summations were plausible enough, because yesterday’s attack was the first successful strike against a U.S. city since Sept. 11, 2001. A national security official from the George W. Bush administration expressed the same thought in even more dramatic terms. “In some ways,” Juan Carlos Zarate said, “this ruptures the psyche.”

Plausible -- but not, we’re glad to say, correct. What’s striking about the initial response to this atrocity is how calm it has been. There was no illusory sense of safety to shatter; the Boston bombing was all too imaginable before the fact; and the national psyche is intact. This measured and purposeful reaction is the worst possible news for the perpetrators, whomever they turn out to be. Rupturing the psyche is what terrorism is supposed to achieve. If it fails to do that, it fails, period.