Ware is a freshman political science major from Griffin. He is involved in Young Democrats.

The Boston Bombing has been on the forefront of every American’s mind for the past week. We all experienced a slew of emotions throughout the ordeal from sadness, to anger, to steadfastness, and to eventual triumph. But one thing stayed constant throughout the whole affair, and that was our vigilance.

After the first bomb went off in Boston, we witnessed civic virtue at its core. We saw strangers helping the injured. Onlookers with no experience assist, side-by-side, with police and military personnel to make sure every injured person was assisted, without any regards for their own safety. We saw their vigilance from the start and we continued to witness that purely American vigilance resonate until the suspects were captured.

Now that the Boston tragedy is over, we are all left to ask ourselves how this happened. There are reports that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had ties to Muslim extremist groups in Chechnya and that the FBI even went so far to keep an eye on his activities after the Russian government provided intelligence suggesting the aforementioned. With that being said, this is no time to extend hate to those in our country who practice Islam or come from the same region or background as the suspects. We must realize we cannot be biased toward any race, religion or nationality because threats to our freedoms don’t come from a pre-packaged physique waiting to be captured by authorities. There are people all around the world who wish to cause harm to America and we will only be doing ourselves a disservice by honing in on one group of people while turning a blind eye to other credible threats.

We must also remember our need for freedom has no breaking point and we must always preserve our freedoms regardless of the threats we face. This is not a time to trade in some of our freedoms for security. We must rather strengthen and boast our freedoms to our enemies and the rest of the world to let them know we value our freedom, we will do anything for our freedom and we won’t let anyone or anything interfere with the freedoms we enjoy that are granted by God and guaranteed by the Constitution. We must be vigilant in protecting our country from threats domestic and foreign, but we must be equally vigilant, if not more vigilant, in making sure we don’t swap out our freedom for the feel of security.