Events unfolded rapidly in Boston this week, from the bombing on Monday to release of photos of the suspects on Thursday to the citywide manhunt for one brother and the killing of the other. While we now know that the two young men are ethnic Chechens who spent time in Kyrgyzstan , we know nothing as yet about why they did what they did.

But perhaps less important than whatever their rationale turns out to have been is how the United States is reacting to the events of this week. On that score, the initial reactions here suggest that we may have turned a post-9/11 corner, still shocked, still pained, but no longer so fearful, so ready to blame religious zealots, and so willing to discard the freedoms that give us such strengths and yet can, at times, leave us so vulnerable.

There will always be people who find some reason to wreak havoc and inflict pain. Yes, such attacks can kill and maim, and thankfully, the Boston Marathon bombing, horrible though it was, did only limited physical harm considering the number of runners and the size of the crowds. It’s what comes after that shapes our lives even more. It’s how society reacts that affects not the hundreds directly harmed and the three killed, not the thousands of friends and loved ones, but the millions and hundreds of millions who were touched only through their sympathy.

The United States has had only limited experience with these attacks, whether foreign or domestic. While the Newtown massacre was a reminder that America is no stranger to homegrown gun violence, bombs designed to shock as well as kill are rarer. In fact, only in the past 50 years has American society slowly adjusted to the types of theatrical violence that the Boston bombing represented.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, repeated Cuban hijackings of U.S. planes led to the first installments of security layers at airports, including metal detectors. In 1993, the World Trade Center was shaken by a bomb detonated in one of its parking garages, killing six and wounding 1,000.*? In 1995, the Murrah office building in Oklahoma City was blown up, killing 168. And the September 11th death tally was nearly 3,000.

In a world increasingly framed by economic debates, the phrase “the laws of economics” has become ever more prevalent. As the U.S. Senate prepares to unveil a new immigration bill, much of the discussion centers on the economics of illegal immigration and the incentives for employers to hire undocumented workers. Said a recent Barron’s article : “Immigration policy is a game governed by classic economic rules, especially by Say’s Law, which says supply creates its own demand … Whether the new applicants are seeking stoop-labor jobs in California’s Central Valley or high-tech jobs in Silicon Valley, the laws of economics dictate the outcome: more immigration.”

How about the war on drugs? Said one recent analysis : “We’re losing the war on drugs because it’s a war that defies the laws of economics. We might as well be fighting a war on gravity.”

And how about what history can tell us about our current policies? Said one recent review of Amity Shlaes’ biography of Calvin Coolidge, which makes the case for Coolidge as an exemplar of responsible economic policy: ?“Our current political leadership ? and we who elect them ? are spending the country into ruin. The laws of man can be bent and broken; the laws of economics can not.”

We think of spring as a time of cherry blossoms and renewed hope, as we slough off the depths of winter and ease into the warmer months. These bright days seem a strange time to encounter the by-now widely circulated warnings of impending doom by Ronald Reagan’s budget director, and current gadfly, David Stockman.

In a long essay in the New York Times drawn from his lengthy and just-published book The Great Deformation , Stockman this week made an impassioned plea for Americans to wake up to the looming crisis just ahead. This crisis, he predicts, will be triggered by a stock market collapse that will remove any lingering illusion that we are OK: “When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth.”

Stockman has many proposed solutions ? abolish Medicare, means-test Social Security ? but little hope of any change. The system is broken, the die is cast, sell, sell, sell, sit with cash in your mattress and hope we can make it through the reckoning.