September 11, 2001, is remembered as the day everything changed. April 15, 2013, may be remembered as the day we were forced to realize that that change is permanent.
President Obama did not say the word "terrorism" in his brief address, but he didn’t have to. Sadly, we’ve come to know terrorism when we see it, and we saw it, and felt it, yesterday in Boston.
We feel it now every day. We feel it when we have to take our shoes off at the airport or empty our bags and pockets when we enter a public building. We feel it when we can’t find a garbage can on the streets of New York, and perhaps never again on the streets of Boston or your home city. We feel it when we are reminded to watch for and report unattended packages and backpacks. We feel it with a sense of unease when we gather in large numbers at a parade or a political or sporting event.
Yesterday we were reminded that all of the precautions, all of the heightened security at home and abroad, all of the wars and the lives sacrificed in battle and the trillions of dollars spent on the War on Terror can only make us safer, but never again safe.
While the talking heads parse the president’s words and debate what message he and the agencies he oversees are sending with their choice of vocabulary, it is a pointless pursuit. We don’t need to hear the word “terrorism” to assimilate such events as happened yesterday in Boston; in the post-9/11 world it can go without saying. To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous description of obscenity, we know terrorism when we see it.
Peace and justice have taken on a shallower definition in today’s world. Neither is something we can ever take for granted again. We may someday not be at war, but we will never again be at peace. And justice only means the will for retribution, but it can never restore what has been taken from us.
September 11, 2001, was the day the world changed. That day’s biggest lesson, that any day can be September 11, 2001, that any place, not least the streets of Boston or your home town, can be the next target, was brought home on April 15, 2013.