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njlauren -> RE: Does it bother anyone else the Boston terrorist is 19? (4/20/2013 11:34:56 AM)
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There is no way at this point to know why someone so young turned the way he did, that one is going to be meat for the profilers and such. The fact that he is so young seems to be shocking because we associate youth with naivete, a blank slate, of not experiencing the horrors of life..but because the young haven't been exposed, they are subject in many cases to easier indoctrination. Cults tend to work best on the young, if Jim Jones came up to a typical 50 year old and told him his spiel, they would be a lot more likely to laugh then an 18 year old. At that age, so much is open, they haven't experienced much, and it is still very, very easy to be manipulated, as the 19 year old may have been. An older sibling can be especially influential with these kinds of things, younger siblings can hero worship the older one, and the rest is history.
One of the key factors here? Alienation, and it is huge. The creep in Aurora was alienated, the two at Columbine were alienated. Immigrants often feel something weird, like they aren't of their old country any more but they don't feel necessarily like they are a part of their new country. My wife wasn't born here, came here as a child, and she still feels that, after so many years (yet my dad, who came to this country when roughly the same age, said he never felt like he was Italian, he said his allegiance was to another country, NYC *lol*). The older brother seems like he felt he never fit in, and felt comfort in identifying with something, in this case with the radicals from back home (nothing like an outsider, to feel like a part of a group of other outsiders, to feel like being part of something). Why they chose the Marathon I'll never know, or why a US event, you would figure they would target something like the Russian embassy .......but the reality was, they chose to hurt people because they could, they planned this, and were quite good at it (unfortunately).
Trying to pin it on Islam or any ideology is hard, because while the brother was apparently radicalized, it doesn't seem like the religion was the motive from what little we know, it sounds more like about what happened back home with the Russians (obviously, this is idle speculation). Religion or other ideology can serve someone alienated well, in the case of Islam, the idea that it brings some sort of justice to the world. Timothy McVeigh, who killed all those people in Oklahoma City, was a whitebread Irish Catholic brought up near Buffalo, not some freak from the Islamic world, and his ideology was the right wing, new world order type of thing that flourishes in right wing crank land, that helps people with diminished futures, like him and his family, blue collar, rust belt, white, not well educated, in terms of some sort of conspiracy of liberals and the government 'taking away' their America and so forth. To these people, it might be that they use the idea of social justice in Islam to justify what they were doing.
As far as can someone like this kid be rehabilitated? Hardened criminals in jails sometimes do, in a sense, they get involved in programs to try and scare kids in trouble into the reality of jail, some of them from their jail cells get an education and then use their time to do things to help others or write or whatever, but that doesn't mean they are fit for society, either. There are two factors with the accused that make me think he can never see the light of day again, whether or not he can be rehabbed: 1)He has to face the consequences of his actions, he wasn't 12, he wasn't a child, and he did what he did knowing it was wrong. The idea of rehab might temper the penalty (life in jail versus death penalty), that perhaps he could make amends for what he did by speaking out to other people, especially the young, about the dangers of getting taken in by ideology like he did 2)It would set a precedent that you can look at someone who otherwise seemed like a decent person and if they come on trial, assume that therefore what they did could be explained away, and that is dangerous, to say the least, when it comes to actions like this you cannot send mixed messages, and say 'we hate terrorism but we understand why someone did it). One of the things we have to remember is something Hanah Arendt called "the banality of evil", that often horrible acts aren't committed by cartoon character bad guys, but are done by people who are so boringly like your next door neighbor.....so we can't say "well, he seemed like such a nice kid" and forget the evil they did.
It is sad when someone so young threw away their lives and wasted the lives of others on something like this, but as sorry as I feel about a wasted life I feel more sorry for the 3 victims of the bombing, the many horribly injured, who were maimed, the MIT cop who was gunned down at age 26, and the people who might very well end up so messed up in the head they can't cope. The fucktards who pulled off 9/11 were young, too, doesn't make what they did any less evil.
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