Beyond the obvious reactions — the tears, the anger, the prayers, the flowers, the sad songs, the attempted words of comfort — last week’s carnage in Boston raises more troubling questions than it is possible to answer.
How did two apparently intelligent young men grow so alienated from and violently hostile toward the country that adopted them kindly?
How were they so profoundly influenced by the hateful preachings of Internet (or other) Islamists that they were willing to randomly take lives of innocent people who had never done them a single wrong?
Why weren’t the positive influences in their lives — parents, friends, teachers — able to outweigh such negative influences as childhoods spent in strife-torn Chechnya and exposure to inspirers of terrorism?
Why was simple compassion — or even, at a minimum, a basic sense of self-preservation — so glaringly missing from the psyches of these two brothers?
We’ll most likely never get anything more than guesses and theories in response to these and other pertinent questions. That’s just about all we’ve ever received when we have asked very similar questions about places like Columbine, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, Norway, Aurora, Sandy Hook, ad infinitum.
Whether such outbreaks of violence were committed by terrorists or “mass killers,” whether they had anything significant to do with such social issues or malaises as mental illness, the right to own guns, immigration, religious extremism, racism, bullying — truthfully, we’ll probably never fully know why any of them happened.
We don’t even know what inner dynamic — madness, fanaticism, evil, all of the above or none of the above — drove such individuals to perform such inhumane deeds.
All we know for sure is that these murderers are committing such crimes against their fellow human beings with steadily increasing frequency and that there are few signs to suggest that the carnage will stop anytime soon.
We cannot, of course, stop asking questions, including the ever elusive “why.”
Human beings that we are, we have no choice but to try to make it more difficult for such killers to reap their harvests, to stop them before they act, to capture them if they act and to deny them notoriety.
We must continue to hope that all this will someday pass.
Until that happens, we have no choice but to accept the sad truth that on any given day in any given place, any one of us, or any one of our loved ones, might perish as the direct result of the actions of people like the malicious brothers whose names we learned only too well last week.
This is, it seems, a burden we must bear.
Copyright © 2013 by the Intermountain Jewish News
