How's it goin', friends in Boston?

Not quite sure how I feel about the recent, um... Terrorism Scare (?) in Boston.

If you have not yet heard, you can read about it here, here and here (yeah, that last one is from the Times India-- Boston news journals surprisingly are not top on the search engines... but India is on it!) You can also see videos here, and my favorite is here.

Now here's the thing. I know it's fun to say "oh look at the politicians/cops/firemen/news jerks who didn't even know that these were Lite-Brites and not bombs" and "who doesn't know about the Aqua Teen Hunger Force?!". It's acutally pretty funny, like when the three-year-old is the only one in the house who knows how to program the VCR.

I don't think it's funny, per se, that cops and firemen and whoever else had to run out and "dismantle" the suspected terror. What I don't understand, though, is that these light boxes cum guerrilla marketing campaigns were just sitting around under bridges, etc. for two weeks and it wasn't until a phone call came in from an average citizen that the alarms were sounded.

If we Americans have learned anything from our strict diet of fear infusions over the past six years, it's that ... well ... um. Any ideas?