(Editors note:) I got this email from son Mike, letting me know how he felt about the tragedy in Boston. I asked if it was OK to share it . I said it might help someone else who feels the same way. -Jerry Robinson

By Mike Robinson

Hearing the news about Boston last week I felt punched by deep sadness, then relieved that nobody I love was harmed.

Gradually after that, I felt grim anger at the readiness of a demented or politically twisted mind to injure others to teach some moral or ideological lesson.

What came to mind were conspiracy theories, like

a) Someone who loves guns wants to scare us into protecting our constitutional guarantee to carry weapons.

b) Someone who sympathizes with Al Qaeda wants to show we face a risk similar to what citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan face daily.

c) In Boston, with its deep Irish ties, someone wanted to show solidarity with his radical Irish history.

d) A foreign student went over the edge in resentment for our military presence in his homeland.

e) A messed up veteran decided to express his pain over the loss of pals in the Middle East.

Then I thought of the practical impact: more security imposed in cities all over the nation: 2 hour waits at airports; heightened surveillance of all of us by those who believe we can only protect democracy by limiting it.

Could our own CIA or FBI have prevented it? Doubtful, unless it was orchestrated by a team. More likely it is the work of a single dissident who believes Americans need to wake from our moral slumber, or pay for cruelties at places like the torture chambers of Baghdad.

So --even if they take him off the streets, the germ of his vehemence lives. It moves in the blood of some Irishmen, almost 400 years after Cromwell. It thrives in the tension in Kenya, where tribal rivalries still rumble, in Venezuela, in the Gaza Strip. In some pockets of America, racism lingers.

30 years ago we came home to find our house a mess, pictures axed, food strewn, personal items stolen: a jar of pennies and a tai chi book. The vandals' car, stranded in our driveway, led police to them. Our items were returned. That humble incident --not forgotten-- is the closest we have come to being random victims of random rage.

That's my tiny final theory: shrinks call it "free-floating hostility," associated with Type A's who have short fuses, get impatient with group process, and often express suppressed rage by pinning the blame on others. They thrive on revenge fantasies. If you need a personal image: think of a husband who beats his wife or kids for disagreeing on just about anything.

So (if we tolerate the bombers) are we like victims of domestic violence who divorce the bum, then marry another guy just like him? If we punish the bum and shrink our own sense of safety by increasing surveillance, are we losing the war in another way, letting his madness rule our lives? Shall we all surrender and become Type A? Finally, if we just get on with our mellow lives, are we naive?

I'm with that guy in Kentucky, who said, 50 years ago when Neil Armstrong walked the moon, "It's all a sham. Just cardboard rockets and a cartoon moon." I treat fanatics the way I treat bad dreams.

They are real enough--so is my dream. It scares me, then I return to my senses. This is not resilience or a resolve to ignore the hazards of inhumanity. It's human nature to move toward the light.

That's how we found our way out of the dark...how we learned to drop the spears, build campfires, trust our brothers. There was nothing to be gained. Hostility toward strangers is as old as our hypothalamus. Fear of invasion filled us when we hid in caves.

I like it better out here in the open...where (as NW poet Ted Roethke once wrote) I live like other creatures,

"...Under the eye of the great owl watching from the elm-tree,
To live by courtesy of the shrike, the snake, the tom-cat.
I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass,
The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway,
The paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising,--
All things innocent, hapless, forsaken."

(Editors update :) We now know the bombers came from Chechnya, not the usual suspects. We still favor hope over despair.)