Should the Redsocks game have been canceled?

OK, I get it. The bastards had killed innocent people and were a threat to kill more, so the public safety system needed to send an all-out message: Authority will stop at nothing, spend whatever it takes, do whatever it takes to catch and kill you dirty stinking terrorists.

So 630,000 people were told to stay home, lock their doors and watch the TV manhunt - which, by the way, was sponsored by Lifestyle Lifts and AndroGel 1.62. (Just as the YouTube and Hulu clips of the crossfire were quickly accompanied by ads.)

A question - and I ask it humbly: After you shut down the city's 21st largest city - canceling not only baseball and hockey games, but pressing down the boot on every personal event in the human scale - to hunt down one guy - one 19-year-old guy -  have you not just put a gleam in the eye of every disillusioned youth or alienated loner out there? One guy shuts down an entire city?

Should Authority be allowed to cancel daily life, as we know it?

Remember the Beltway sniper attacks of 2002? Those two killed 10 over 23 days. For all the public outrage and fear, Authority didn't cancel daily life.

OK, I hate to bring this up - but Thursday night, they had the assholes pinned down - no way short of a Tarantino movie for anyone to escape. Somehow the kid turns into a mix of Ryan Gossling and Claude Raines, punches through the front line and rides off into the dawn. Let's accept that shit happens in the chaos of gunfire and the cloak of night, and let's be thankful no bystanders died in that incredible crossfire, which sounded like the London millennium fireworks display... but I wonder... did him getting away cause somebody to go a wee bit overboard?

Yesterday - the people of Boston, ordered to stay home and watch TV - witnessed the most overwhelming display of armed and armored Authority in our nation's history. The police declared martial law and stopped commerce, traffic - daily life - in an entire U.S. city. To catch one guy. 

Thank God they got him. Thank God it's over. (Fingers crossed.) And if you disagree with me, fine. I don't claim to have the answers. But none of the TV news personalities  I watched yesterday asked any of these questions. They just marveled at the cop presence like debutantes cooing over the muscles of their bodyguards.

I just hope we rethink this business of calling the game and canceling life whenever something bad happens. Because evil didn't end yesterday.

Consider this statement:

It's not just the day after yesterday. It's also the day before tomorrow.

Now, does that line give you fear... or hope? If you think fear, my friends, something has gone terribly wrong.