Thoughts From Boston 2: The Goalkeeper

My younger daughter is a goalkeeper.  And a damn good one, if I do say so.  

She makes a lot of amazing saves.

She also lets some goals through.  A lot of times my wife and I will turn to each other and say, "well, that was undefendable."  Maybe you've seen a goal like that--where the goalie does everything right but still can't make the save because the ball is coming in at a crazy angle toward the top far corner and nobody on earth could have defended it.

I certainly don't intend to trivialize what happened here last week by comparing it to soccer, but I have been thinking about this as people wring their hands and ask how this could have been prevented.

It couldn't.  There really is no defense against someone with evil intentions wanting to kill people.  Today in Boston and every other city, people will fill the sidewalks, and anyone driving by on the street would find it ridiculously easy to drive up on the sidewalk and kill a bunch of people.  

I could list any number of similar scenarios--anywhere that people get together, there's a potential for someone to kill a bunch of people.  The fact that this happens so very rarely is, I think, something pretty encouraging about humanity.  I say this as a dedicated misanthrope.

Short of having half the population employed conducting 24/7 electronic surveillance on the other half, there really is no way to prevent people with evil intentions from lashing out.

It doesn't mean we shouldn't take reasonable precautions, but let's not go crazy trying to prevent this from happening again.  Let's just hope it doesn't.  Because, really, that's all we can do.