This could be the heart-warming story of a slightly alienated outsider–still relatively new to a city of distinctive character–who realizes that he loves it when he lives through an attack. But I want to explore some problematic aspects of my recent psychological journey.

Terrorism typically creates in-groups. I have seen that happen at various stages of my life: as a child in London during the height of the IRA attacks, as a father and husband in DC on 9/11, and now in #BostonStrong. If you watched Neil Diamond leading the entire swaying Fenway crowd in a chorus of “Sweet Caroline” on Saturday, it was hard not to grin. But membership in such passionate mass communities can do harm as well as good. The psychological dynamics are powerful and require attention.

Last Friday, I got my hair cut, as usual, by a middle-aged woman who has never lived anywhere other than Somerville, MA–traditionally, a working-class Irish and Italian city deep in the Boston metro area. I told her that our kid has moved back from LA to work in Boston, and she said, “Oh yeah, people are so much nicer here.” She caught me smiling in the mirror because Bostonians do not, in fact, have a reputation for niceness. Even moving from DC (the city of northern gentility and southern efficiency), we were struck by the brusque manners and chilliness of Boston. I understand where my hair-cutter is coming from, but my smile was the ironic response of an outsider.

On Monday, we heard about the Marathon bombings from Martha’s Vineyard, where we are fortunate to spend a lot of time. That means we were across some salt water and through some dense woods from Boston, which couldn’t have felt much more remote. I started receiving messages of concern and commiseration. I was (and remain) grateful for these sentiments, but they felt undeserved. Although I replied warmly, I was partly thinking: Of course I’m OK. The bombers have killed one person per two million in the greater Boston area. There were 52 murders in the city alone last year, and this is just three more. What all terrorists want is attention. Let us not give them more than we have to.

I now feel a little guilty admitting that we were on Martha’s Vineyard–so safe and far away–because that places us outside of the circle of the victims. We weren’t there when the bombing happened. But of course, if we had been sitting in our suburban house, we wouldn’t have been there, either. What’s interesting is the psychological mechanism that makes me feel mildly embarrassed that we were outside the community when it was attacked.

As I wrote last week, I was not a victim–not harmed, not frightened, and not even inconvenienced. I could have made myself very sad by reading about the actual victims. And I could have put myself in the picture (so to speak) by drawing personal connections to the events. For example, we have close ties to the high school from which the younger bomber graduated. But to follow the human side of the story closely and emotionally would have been a choice, not an obligation. It was the choice that the terrorists wanted, and not one that would have done the victims any good. I do not think that stoking one’s own emotions of pity and fear in reaction to terrorism is likely to yield good results. What terrorists want is attention, and we do not have to give it to them.

Then flash forward to Friday, when we were under “lock down” just blocks from the Watertown town line. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was on the loose within easy jogging distance. It was an eery feeling, reminiscent of DC in the early days after 9/11 (when we also faced the anthrax mail attacks and the Washington-area snipers). A helicopter hovered overhead. You would have had to talk me into opening our own garage door to look inside.

By now, I was shifting toward a full identification with Boston. An Arkansas state representative named Nate Bell tweeted, “I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine?” I was enraged. I wanted to tweet back something like, “Why don’t you come up here and say that to our faces? We’ll show you how Boston liberals ‘cower.'” On any given day, I read many political statements that I strongly disagree with. It was interesting how this one felt like a personal insult, as if my name were “Boston liberal.”

I was supposed to spend that day with organizers of the International Summer School on Religion and Public Life. It was a small group of deeply committed activists and intellectuals from Uganda, Britain, Canada, and the US, talking about how to live together with solidarity in deep ethical difference. Since we were under lockdown and I felt responsible for the kids, they met at a private house in Newton and I Skyped in from Belmont. A straight line between us would have run through Watertown. We talked soberly about peace while the sirens blared.

By the next morning, the sense of emotional identification was almost complete. I was humming “Sweet Caroline” all day. But a quiet voice said something like this: We now know that one badly injured 19-year-old was hiding in a boat, and an entire metro area shut down for more than 12 hours. I have sympathy for the police, who were actually in danger (unlike me) and who must have expected to lock down a few towns for an hour or so before they caught Tsarnaev. I can hardly imagine their frustration as the hours passed. But still, if a single fugitive teenager can cause our lives to stop–and ignite a national debate about basic constitutional rights, and turn an outsider into a passionate Bostonian–how strong are we?

I do appreciate the emails and Facebook posts of sympathy. But we must make sure 4/15 doesn’t turn into the tragedy of 9/11 repeated as some kind of cruel farce. Nine-Eleven involved one thousand times more deaths, it was genuinely scary because we assumed that more attacks were imminent–and yet we drastically overreacted. We militarized the nation’s capital, violated the Constitution, invaded two countries, and (at a personal level) altered our behavior and expectations. We should have absorbed 9/11 with far more resilience. The lesson for 4/15 is to move on rapidly and with confidence.

But I still care for Boston more than I used to  …