…I do love this city. I love its atrocious accent, its inferiority complex in terms of New York, its nut-job drivers, the insane logic of its street system. I get a perverse pleasure every time I take the T in the winter and the air-conditioning is on in the subway car, or when I take it in the summer and the heat is blasting. Bostonians don\u2019t love easy things, they love hard things \u201d\u201d blizzards, the bleachers in Fenway Park, a good brawl over a contested parking space. Two different friends texted me the identical message yesterday: They messed with the wrong city. This wasn\u2019t a macho sentiment. It wasn\u2019t \u201cBring it on\u201d\u009d or a similarly insipid bit of posturing. The point wasn\u2019t how we were going to mass in the coffee shops of the South End to figure out how to retaliate. Law enforcement will take care of that, thank you. No, what a Bostonian means when he or she says \u201cThey messed with the wrong city\u201d\u009d is \u201cYou don\u2019t think this changes anything, do you?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
Trust me, we won\u2019t be giving up any civil liberties to keep ourselves safe because of this. We won\u2019t cancel next year\u2019s marathon. We won\u2019t drive to New Hampshire and stockpile weapons. When the authorities find the weak and terminally maladjusted culprit or culprits, we\u2019ll roll our eyes at whatever backward ideology they embrace and move on with our lives.<\/p>\n