Boston and the illusion of safety

 Ten years on now, and today the forecast calls for 50s and rain for the Boston Marathon, and the runners will glide and lope and in some cases stagger along that old, old route from Hopkinton to Boston, and the hills around Newton will take their old, old toll. 

Ten years on, and everyone will pause to reflect on the day the bombs went off and downtown Boston became Baghdad 2004, with blood and screaming and the awful realization that we are never really safe, not anywhere nor at any time.

Ten years on ... 

And we should have learned that by now. Or even by then.

A nation awash in military-grade weaponry and madness should have taught us that by April 15, 2013, but it took two brothers with their minds twisted by hate to drive home the point. And if we've forgotten it because no one since  has left two backpacks full of death at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, surely the America of 2023, with its This Week In Mass Shootings ambience, should be a sufficient reminder.

On the 10th anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings, and the ensuing manhunt that had the greater Boston area living with its heart in its throat for five days, I looked up what I wrote about it. And, sadly, it is no less true now than it was then:

This is why the metal detectors are there now, beeping and buzzing us into the places where we play our games. It's why we hold out our arms and unzip our jackets and spread our legs while the wand passes up one inseam and down the other, while it travels from armpit to fingertip and then (please, sir) from the other armpit to the other fingertip.

The illusion of safety. That's what we're all after here.

And so the metal detectors and the wanding and the bag searches -- some perfunctory, some not so -- and, if's a Super Bowl, the bomb-sniffing dogs. Because these are our spectacles, our circus, and with spectacle comes dark opportunity. And once that dark opportunity is acknowledged or assuaged or dealt with, at least in our minds, then the games can begin ...

Ten years on now, and it's as if I wrote that yesterday, or today.

Ten years on, and now I'm remembering not April 15, 2013 in Boston but a warm summer night there nine months ago, when my wife and I were standing in a queue to get into Fenway Park for a Red Sox-Yankees game.

The metal detectors. The wanding. And then my wife being told she couldn't bring her handbag into the game, because it was too big. 

Instead of leaving it with security, she simply dug everything out of it she needed and pitched it in a trashcan. She needed a new one anyway, she figured.

The illusion of safety. Ten years on, in Boston and elsewhere, we still chase it. 

And live our lives anyway, because the alternative is no alternative at all.