Defiance is no antidote for fear

In effect, Americans have been holding our breaths since 9/11. On Monday, in sorrow, they exhaled, writes Anne Taylor

SO another day with another infamous history: Apr 15, 2013. That date has now been internalised in our collective guts. Alas, it is an easy one to remember. The Boston Marathon — a race that will never again be run without a shiver of fear, a dark cloud.

Something so darkly grim about runners losing their limbs.

It took Americans a long time from Sept 11, 2001, to calm down, but finally we did. Finally, we started to relax, grumbling more about taking our shoes off in the endless airport security lines. Now it starts again: The fear, the looking around, the suspicion, the sense of our fragility.

I called a friend as soon as I heard. She is a marathon runner but wasn’t in Boston. “I love you,” I said. She laughed; she hadn’t heard. “Don’t run anymore,” I said. As if that would solve anything. As if the very point of this kind of act is its randomness. Never the same place twice. Keep them guessing. Keep them alert. Keep them terrified.

And we are. We have moved back into the zone of fear. We are horrified but not shocked. We are no longer the abashed innocents.

I hear the psychologists talking on TV. The men have coifed hair, the women have buffed arms. Their makeup is perfect. Remind your kids, they tell us, of all the good people there are, the first responders, the trauma surgeons. Listening to them seems surreal, reassuring pap. Because what you hear, if you listen, is a wail from the parental heart of America.

We cannot keep our children safe. Yes, we can tell them they are good people and bad people, etc. etc. But we cannot keep them safe. That is the new reality. An 8-year-old boy died on the streets of Boston at the finishing line of the race. This is our country now.

We are on notice again, looking at backpacks and rubbish cans and vehicles left too long on our streets.

We are an odd lot, individualistic; we bowl alone. And then we venture forth and take unexpected pleasure in being part of an event, an audience, together. Look around. Everyone’s laughing in synch, eating hot dogs or running a marathon. Thousands of Americans doing something together, clapping, rowing, running. Kaboom: Thank you for making such a nice target. Can you hear it: the sick laugh of the murderer?

One thing we hate is knowing we are hated. In the fibre of most Americans is that enduring sense that we are the good guys — if not always perfect. There are those who take refuge in the notion that we are indeed perfect, exceptional, no matter what. In recent years, one has often heard a more balanced or nuanced read.

We have our own ugly images to deal with: Abu Ghraib, water- boarding (and go back, if you will, to slavery and to what was done to American Indians).

No one is suggesting such things condone what happened Monday. Only that we as a people have had to assimilate these images in our own self-image. For all that, we still hold our country in a sacred place.

We honour it. We love it. We think it still, with whatever flaws, a moving and miraculous experiment in democratic ideals. We do. I do. For my country to be hated enough, by someone who could do what was done on Monday — is wounding on both an immediate (what will happen next?) level and an existential one.

A rage bubbles up. A deep rage-filled sadness. How will this end? How can we protect ourselves? How can we protect our children? We have so many questions now and not a lot of answers.

We hear, of course, the plucky rejoinder in the random interviews of people, the “we will not let the terrorists win” mantra. But underneath that bravado and admirable survival instinct, is a grief, not just for those maimed or lost, but for the sense of safety, of being able to congregate and celebrate without trepidation, without a sense of being vulnerable, hated, a potential statistic.

Three people were killed on the streets of Boston, 176 were injured. This is a different country today than it was yesterday. There has been the hope that somehow the law enforcement brigades with all their sophisticated equipment and surveillance were going to be able to keep us safe.

Even as we held our breath, we have been holding it for over a decade and change. On Monday, in sorrow, we exhaled.