The Boston Massacre - A Lesson for Today

From today's The Writer's Almanac:

"It's the anniversary of the Boston Massacre, which took place on a cold and snowy night in 1770. British soldiers had occupied Boston for 18 months to protect the tax collectors for the king of England. There had been several street fights between soldiers and townsmen since the beginning of the month, so tensions were already high on the evening of March 5th 

The "massacre" itself was touched off by an argument between a young barber's apprentice and a British officer about payment for a haircut. The barber's apprentice claimed that the officer had not paid, and the soldier reportedly knocked the kid down in the street. 

A crowd of young men gathered and soldiers came out into the street. The growing crowd taunted the soldiers, and threw ice and oysters at them. When the soldiers brandished their weapons, the crowd dared them to shoot, and they did. When the smoke cleared, five colonists were dead or dying — Crispus Attucks, Patrick Carr, Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, and Christopher Monk — and three more were injured. It was hardly a massacre, but the revolutionary members of the colonies played it up as much as they could. 

A town committee wrote a pamphlet called A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston,and Paul Revere made an engraving of the incident, showing the British soldiers lining up like an organized army to suppress the colonist uprising. Printed under the engraving were verses that described the soldiers as "fierce barbarians grinning over their prey." 

The Boston Massacre was one of the signal events leading to the Revolutionary War and led directly to the British Royal Governor evacuating the occupying British Army from Boston.  In my view, it should be a lesson for governments having armies serve as unwelcome occupiers in areas throughout the world today.  The fervor of the Boston Massacre would soon spread to the other colonies.colonies.