"Jury Selected in Boston Marathon Bombing Trial", reports The Crimson today. I don't care.

I am so far beyond caring about where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ends up that I'm refusing to click on that link, and won't give you a hyperlink here; feel free to search it up on your own, if you like. I am aggressively refusing to care.

Or at least, aggressively refusing to indulge in anything that would incite me to care more than I can possibly avoid.

I mean, look, you can hate the kid. You can meditate on the violence he perpetrated against the city of Boston and the fear that he and his brother struck across our city for days, plural, of 2013. You can follow the news of his trial, conviction, and imprisonment with a carefully-stoked bloodthirst, and feel a measure of closure on behalf of our city when he gets put away for life without parole, or executed.^[1] You can live a life where every time you're reminded of him or his brother, you indulge in the feeling of rising rage. I understand too well how close this thing cut to tell you not to do that, because, really, I understand.

But I won't. Quoth Pratchett:

"But we should kill him!"

"No. You've been listen to Brocando too often," said Bane.

Brocando bristled. "You know what he is! Why not kill--" he began, but he was interrupted.

"Because it doesn't matter what he is. It matters what we are."

I'm never going to see Dzhokhar, and I'll never have any sort of human interaction with him. Whether I hold him in animosity or pity or indifference makes no difference in his life -- the only effect will be in mine. And, so far as I have a measure of control over my emotions, I'd really rather prefer to have less hate in my heart. But since I can't forgive him either -- because real forgiveness is hard, and I, unfortunately, am not quite that charitable -- I'll let it go.

That's the best I can do.

Epilogue

I do, however, choose to remember the events of April 2013 -- perhaps over-rosily -- with a carefully guarded fondness. I've blogged before about the sense of community that I felt at Harvard that week, and the experience has left me with something of an ability to understand what people in other places are going through when similar events strike their hometowns. None of that made it 'worth it', of course, but, given that everything that's past has already happened, they're the lessons I choose to carry away from it all.

Epilogue II

Though, of course, we lose even that, when we let ourselves heal. The positive things affect us less, and, as we let go of the negative ones, the entire event fades into vaguely-remembered history. Which, all told, is for the best. Terrorists lose when you forget about them.