Bombs at the Boston Marathon, poison letters mailed from Mississippi to President Obama and a U.S. senator, an explosion in a fertilizer plant destroying much of a town in Texas, two wounded by bullets as 80,000 gathered at an annual marijuana festival in the center of Denver: What are we to make of all this happening in a single week?
Against this background of mayhem, the U.S. Senate at the same time killed off all gun reform. What are we to make of that?
And almost simultaneously the Congress for the first time started work on the only immigration reform bill in many years that actually has a good chance of enactment. How does this piece fit into the puzzle of dramatic events?
It seems to me there are several lessons to be learned from the terrible tragedies and momentous moments of recent days.
One such lesson concerns what is dangerous. Yes, guns are dangerous, but so are poison powder, flawed industrial plants and homemade bombs. So is a mere knife, which was used to injure some 22 children and one adult in a school in China in December. (Had the assailant, a local villager, been wielding a gun, all 23 would probably be dead rather than wounded.)
That doesn't mean we shouldn't control gun violence; it does mean that we should not stop at guns. Violence, all violence, is a sickness that destroys civilization. A fertilizer plant with a history of safety violations proved last week it can kill and injure even more people and cause far more damage than a pair of committed terrorists.
A second lesson is that this is a dangerous age. Periodically in the past we have been reminded of danger: during the Civil War when assassins strode the streets of the nation's capital, in World War II when a panicked government shipped every Japanese descendant it could find off to concentration camps, during the Cold War when elementary students were instructed to hide beneath their school desks to protect themselves from falling H bombs, and after 9/11 when some Americans saw a terrorist behind every Muslim's beard and the American President stayed airborne in Air Force One because he was afraid to land.
Between these episodes of threat, however, we lived, or pretended to live, inside a balloon of normality, as if the world really was as safe and secure a place as we had grown up imagining it to be.
It is not, and possibly never was; we just didn't realize it; and on the rare occasions when we did, the irrationality of exaggerated fears displaced reasoned assessment of the real threat.
Even in contemporary Europe, which some have described as the safest place in the history of civilization, terrorists struck, in Spain and England, as they did in peaceful Japan, and a mass murderer annihilated scores of children in a camp in Norway—serene, bucolic, prosperous, contented, egalitarian Norway. Then, two days ago, Holland shut 22 schools because a former student from Britain threatened a massacre.
This is the next lesson, then: We live in a world without meaningful borders, and any attempt to restore them, fence them, fortify them is doomed.
In 2002 two children move to Boston from Chechnya. One becomes an American citizen and the other marries an American citizen and has his own citizenship application pending. In 2013 they convert the joyful Boston Marathon into a horrific killing field.
Was this the long-term consequence of Russia's two brutal wars against its secessionist province and of the American failure to take any meaningful action to stem the violence or even register its displeasure? Had we dared to tell Vladimir Putin what we thought of his scorched-earth strategy, his policy of collective guilt, his army's vicious murder and torture, would those two young men have still turned a great American city into a hunkered-down scene of terror?
There are no longer real borders. The Internet reaches everywhere, immigration reaches everywhere. Money, people, goods, ideas move around the world with unprecedented ease. We can't stop it. We can't pick out the good to abet and screen out the bad to ban. It's all of a piece.
So the last lesson is to reconcile ourselves to life in this perilous world—because we have no choice.
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