Manchester bombing

Charles Pierce has an Esquire article about the latest terror attack in the UK:

Nothing about it was unprecedented. It was a mass casualty terrorist attack in Manchester, in the northwest of England. That is not unprecedented. In 1996, the Irish Republican Army set off a truck bomb in Manchester that injured two hundred people and did damage estimated at seven hundred million pounds. There were no fatalities, because the IRA phoned in a warning and seventy-five thousand people were evacuated.
It was a mass casualty terrorist attack that targeted children. This, also, is not unprecedented. Timothy McVeigh set off his truck bomb at the Murrah Federal Building even though he knew the building's day-care center would be open and full. The separatists who took over the school in Beslan in 2004 certainly knew they were targeting children, and the Russian forces who stormed the place with overwhelming force certainly knew there were children in there. If you want to stretch the terrorist designation to fit, Adam Lanza certainly knew who he was shooting when he walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School shortly before Christmas of 2012.
There is nothing unprecedented about the darkness in the human heart that causes young people to dress in explosives and murder people on a grand scale. It is that same darkness that encompasses both the Manchester Arena and the bus stop in Maryland where the life of Lieutenant Richard Collins III ended over the weekend. Hatred is not blind. That's a lie we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night. Hatred sees very well. Hatred can see several streets over. Hatred can see across seas and across continents. Hatred can see down the block to a bus stop in Maryland as clearly as it can see all the way from a cave in Afghanistan to the streets of lower Manhattan. When it looks for its victims, hatred can see like a hawk.
Hatred is a constant in the human condition, all the way back to Cain, if you believe in that sort of thing. Hatred is part of the connective tissue of human evolution, stretching from the savannas of east Africa to the streets of Manchester. Hatred walked upright as soon as we learned how to do so. Hatred is part of what has bound us to our prehistoric ancestors. The human is a predatory animal. It hunts to feed its appetites. Hatred is an appetite, and demands to be fed.
Its only true rival in the long march of the species is the ability to reason, to think beyond our appetites. It is a constant struggle and it is not always a fair fight. Think of the slaughters over which god to worship, and how, and where. Think of the books and the witches burning. Think of lynching, and of six hundred thousand Americans slaughtering each other over the self-evident fact that one human being should not be able to purchase another one. Hatred is powerful. So is reason. But, sometimes, it seems that reason is Prometheus, chained to a rock, and that hatred is the eagle that comes to feed on his viscera, day after day. Then again, reason is an appetite, too. It demands to be fed. We are better for it when it is satisfied.
None of this is meant to diminish the awful reality of what happened in Manchester. The horror is genuine and the pain and loss are all too real. But the surprise at that horror ought not to prevail. We do these things to each other. We always do these things to each other. We gussy them up with political or philosophical camouflage. We anoint them with the preferred incense of whatever faith we pretend to follow. But we do these things to each other because we always do these things to each other, and because, over time and throughout history, hatred and reason have fought each other over the fundamental human impulse to satiate themselves. They fight to no better than a draw, one bloody night at a time.

Rico says race and religion play far too big a part in this...