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?”

Trust me, we won’t be giving up any civil liberties to keep ourselves safe because of this. We won’t cancel next year’s marathon. We won’t drive to New Hampshire and stockpile weapons. When the authorities find the weak and terminally maladjusted culprit or culprits, we’ll roll our eyes at whatever backward ideology they embrace and move on with our lives….

….The little man or men who did this will, I have faith, be arrested, jailed and forgotten. Whatever hate movement they belong to will ultimately go the way of the anarchist assassination movements of the early 20th century or the Symbionese Liberation Army of the 1970s. Those killed and maimed, starting with 8-year-old Martin Richard of my neighborhood, Dorchester, and his injured sister and mother, will be remembered. The community will eulogize the dead and provide care and solace for the injured. And, no, we’ll never forget. But what we’ll cling tightest to is what the city was built on — resilience, respect and an adoration for civility and intellect.

Boston took a punch on Monday — two of them, actually — that left it staggering for a bit. Flesh proved vulnerable, as flesh is wont to do, but the spirit merely trembled before recasting itself into something stronger than any bomb or rage.

Just a note to all people planning on giving blood, remember it only has a shelf life of 42 days. After 9/11, so many people donated that there was a glut of blood in the system and much of it expired on the shelves, unused, because there was more than needed. ALso, if you donate right now, you will not be eligible to donate again for 8 weeks, so about a month after 9/11 there was a bit of a shortage, because many people couldn’t donate again for several weeks.

Consider delaying your donation for a week or two to insure a good steady flow of blood that will allow blood banks to replenish their inventory. Most blood banks in the United States are part of an emergency sharing system and will be shipping ready to transfuse products to Boston if they are needed. Spacing out donations insures everyone will have blood to provide their community in the coming weeks.