Headlines are generally written by editors, not writers, so maybe I can cut Friedman some slack for today's, "Bring on the Next Marathon," with its obvious reference to George W. Bush inviting Iraq's insurgents to "bring it on."  Iraq's insurgents did, in fact, bring it on.  By the time Bush said that, it had already been broughten.

What Friedman meant, of course, is that we should go about our lives in a free civil society and continue to hold public events.  We should clean up quickly, he argues, in the manner of the Israeli authorities, and not dwell or over memorialize terrorist acts.  No problem, Tom.  This is the public that reacted to 9/11 by going shopping while its government launched two wars, built out its flying death robot program and granted itself unchecked powers for domestic and international espionage while establishing an extralegal prison system that has so far survived two presidents.

Friedman seems worried that the public will let the Boston attack damage the national psyche.  That is unlikely.  The bigger threat is that the public fails to question the way the government ultimately deals with this.

The real issue is that people might react to this as Thomas Friedman did to 9/11, should this attack have its origins outside of America.  I'd hate to find us globetrotting again in search of "terrorism bubbles," and people who we can tell to "Suck.  On.  This."

Contemporary Friedman admits that the U.S. may have "over-reacted" to 9/11.  But he doesn't say this definitively.  He doesn't address his own over-reaction from a decade ago.

Also, though he doesn't quite say it, he writes as if he assumes that the attack was, indeed, connected to international terrorism or some sort of political terrorism.  At this point, we don't know it's those things are true or not.  We don't know if this is part of the continuum of our post 9/11 politics or whether it stands apart.  It's just too early for Thomas Friedman to start lecturing the public about how to react.

We should hold out for some information, first.  A measured response to Boston, whatever its cause, will at least prove that we've learned something since 2003.