What To Hold On To After Boston

by Stuart Shapiro

On a day when little makes sense (we’ve had a lot of those lately), Joe Posnanski reminds us:

But the heroes. We hold on to them. They ran in into the noise and fury. They carried the injured. They opened their homes to the stranded. There was the man in the cowboy hat, who ran alongside a young runner in a wheelchair and said those powerful words: Stay with me. There was the former football player, Joe Andruzzi, who lifted a woman who could not walk. There was a blur of others, so many others, most of them far from the cameras, who coaxed and warned and alerted and tried, somehow, to help. . .

There is one thing present: That powerful human need to help. That is our hope — in Boston, in Newtown, in Oklahoma City, in Columbine. People run toward the danger. People apply pressure to stop the bleeding. People send money they need. People pray for men and women and children they never met. People do stop attacks before they unleash and notice bombs before they go off.Yes, this is our hope. All through the night, people in Boston wrote and talked about the terror and the pain, of course, but what was so striking is that they also wrote and talked about small kindnesses and large ones. They wrote and talked about the spirit of their city, and how it can never be broken. It was haunting and beautiful. And it was deeply true. This is something we hold on to in the moments of darkness. There are exponentially more good people than bad

By: Stuart Shapiro

Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.