It was about 1 P.M. on Friday when I decided this fine country of ours had lost its moorings and gone a little nuts. That was when I heard that the authorities—which particular ones wasn’t clear—had stopped the trains running between New York and Boston. At Penn Station, a radio reporter said, Amtrak passengers and trains were piling up.

It wasn’t just the trains, it turned out. Some of the airspace over Boston was closed lest … well, it wasn’t clear lest what, but lest something. Logan Airport remained open, but there wasn’t any mass transit running to and from it. And all this on a Friday at lunchtime, when tens of thousands—who knows, maybe hundreds of thousands—of people are preparing to move north or south along the Boston-New York corridor. Even buses were halted, thus enabling the benighted Tsarnaev brothers to achieve something that proved beyond Emperor Hirohito and Hitler. They stopped the Greyhound.

While all this wasn’t happening, one of the Tsarnaevs, Tamerlan, was already dead. His younger brother Dzhokhar was widely presumed to be hiding out in Watertown, where, sometime during the previous night, he and his brother had staged their “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”-style shoot-out with the cops. With the streets of the leafy suburb overrunning with enough armed police, federal agents, and national guards to invade a small country, there didn’t seem to be much chance of Dzhokhar slipping the dragnet, but that didn’t prevent Governor Deval Patrick from ordering nearly a million people in the Boston area to abandon their regular lives for a day and stay indoors, or, as the official order put it, “shelter indoors.” Those who didn’t hear about the edict quickly discovered something was up when they ventured outside. Almost the entire city was abandoned. Offices, stores, and gas stations were all closed.

From one perspective, I suppose, this was just a sensible precaution. During the overnight shootout, many details of which remain unclear, one police officer had been killed and another one had been injured. The police believed Dzhokhar to be armed and dangerous. But does that justify locking down an entire city? America is a violent place. Practically every day, somewhere in the country, cops are looking for armed and dangerous men who have just killed one or more innocent members of the public. But when a gunman runs amok in East L.A., say, they don’t close down Brentwood or Santa Monica. The very thought is absurd.

Ah, you may say, Tsarnaev wasn’t just an ordinary criminal or lunatic; he was a terrorist, and, according to some reports, he had one or more explosive devices, possibly including a bomb vest. Now we are getting to the crux of things. Whenever the word “terrorist” is mentioned in this country, reason tends to go out the window, and many other things go with it, too, such as intellectual consistency, a respect for civil liberties, and a sense of proportion. On Thursday, at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, President Obama, in a moving and eloquent address, hailed the spirit of Americans—“our faith in each other, our love for each other, our love for country”—and he added:

That’s why a bomb can’t beat us. That’s why we don’t hunker down. That’s why we don’t cower in fear. We carry on. We race. We strive. We build, and we work, and we love—and we raise our kids to do the same. And we come together to celebrate life, and to walk our cities, and to cheer for our teams.

Not on Friday, we didn’t. The Rex Sox and Bruins games were cancelled. Bostonians didn’t carry on. They stayed at home, if not “cowering” then at least “sheltering.” They couldn’t even go to church and pray for divine intervention. Most religious services had been cancelled, too.

One of those affected was Yaakov Katz, a Jerusalem Post reporter who has covered many terrorist attacks and who is now on sabbatical at Harvard. In an article posted on his newspaper’s Web site on Friday titled “What message is the U.S. sending with a Boston lockdown?,” Katz contrasted his experience at home with what he was witnessing in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

There was no lockdown in Israel and there was no order by the mayor to seek shelter. Instead, people were out in the streets, filling up coffee shops right next to the one that had been bombed or standing at bus stops waiting for the next bus from the same line that had just exploded. This has always impressed me as a sign of true resilience, of a refusal to allow terrorism to change our way of life. I am not judging the people of Boston and their leaders and yes, there is something to be said about being safe than sorry. But, I wonder about the long-term strategic ramifications and if this won’t be viewed as a near-surrender to terrorism.

“Surrender” is a strong word that suggests a failure of will on the part of the American people at large. The real culprit was a near-hysterical overreaction by the authorities (and by large parts of the media, which virtually stopped covering anything else). From the very beginning, it was clear that this was a crudely staged attack that only succeeded in causing so many casualties because the bombs went off in crowds. On Friday morning, when it became clear that the perpetrators were two young Chechen immigrants, whose uncle appeared to describe them as “losers,” the threat level was greatly reduced. This doesn’t appear to be some well-coördinated attack carried out by Al Qaeda but, rather, an amateurish one.

To be sure, the ongoing threat of such attacks is real. Given the plots to blow up Times Square and the New York underground, among others, that shouldn’t surprise anybody. On this side of the Atlantic, until this week, we’d been lucky. Many other countries have been less fortunate. About a mile from where I grew up, in Leeds, West Yorkshire, four young men of Pakistani extraction set up a bomb factory that they used to create bombs that, in July, 2005, killed fifty-two people, as well as themselves, on subway trains and buses in London. In a fine post on the happenings in Boston, my colleague Adam Gopnik, who was in London at the time, points out that in the hours after the attacks, the bombers were (mistakenly) believed to be still at large. But the city didn’t shut down. That very evening, even the buses were running again. As in Israel, there was a determination to carry on as normally as possible.