BOSTON

WHEN I was 9 years old, at the height of the busing crisis in 1974, I drove with my parents and brother through South Boston on our way to Dorchester, where we lived. On West Broadway we got stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic and crawled for a mile through one of the more frightening mass gatherings I’ve ever witnessed. Effigies of Judge Arthur Garrity and Senator Edward Kennedy and Mayor Kevin White were hung from street lamps and set afire. The flames were reflected in the windows of my father’s Chevy, and I looked through them at the faces of a mob so incensed it was medieval. Reason was not popular on West Broadway that night. Nor was compassion or a desire to debate our differences with nuance or a respect for complexity. In the place of civil discourse, rage ruled.

I bring this up now, in the wake of a terrorist attack on the city where I was born and from which I draw my creative fuel, for two reasons. 1) Because that night was my ur-experience, if you will, with rage. I’d seen anger, of course, and I’d seen violence, too, but rage — beyond reason, beyond intellect, beyond conciliation — was a different beast. 2) When I speak of my love for this city, it will be understood that the love does not come filtered through a soft-focus lens. I’m fully aware of the sins that litter the Hub’s rearview.

But I do love this city. I love its atrocious accent, its inferiority complex in terms of New York, its nut-job drivers, the insane logic of its street system. I get a perverse pleasure every time I take the T in the winter and the air-conditioning is on in the subway car, or when I take it in the summer and the heat is blasting. Bostonians don’t love easy things, they love hard things — blizzards, the bleachers in Fenway Park, a good brawl over a contested parking space. Two different friends texted me the identical message yesterday: They messed with the wrong city. This wasn’t a macho sentiment. It wasn’t “Bring it on” or a similarly insipid bit of posturing. The point wasn’t how we were going to mass in the coffee shops of the South End to figure out how to retaliate. Law enforcement will take care of that, thank you. No, what a Bostonian means when he or she says “They messed with the wrong city” is “You don’t think this changes anything, do you?”