As a 10 year resident of Cambridge, I have been following the Boston
marathon bombings, but it wasn't until I saw this tweet from a NYT
reporter that I thought about the connection to young adults.
As the story unfolds, we will understand more about the motivations of
the bombers: nationalism, religion, or neither. Right now we just have
questions, such as which factors cause an adolescent to turn into the
type of young adult who travels thousands of miles to Boston to become a
statistics graduate student as opposed to a
boxer or
alleged bomber?
We asked a similar question during my first year in college, when one
alienated foreign student killed her socially-integrated roommate in a
murder-suicide.
I remember that spring morning in 1995, wheeling a hand truck filled
with boxes from my dorm to Dunster House and finding Dunster surrounded
by police tape. The rumors in the street were that a dozen people had
been stabbed and the killer was on the loose; ultimately it turned out
to be just 2, and the killer had hung herself an hour ago. Meanwhile, I needed to
figure out what to do with my boxes. I threw them over the wrought iron
fence into the side yard and hoped for the best.
Melanie Thernstrom
researched the crime and published a book that included intriguing
foreshadowing, such as the killer sending letters to strangers from the
Boston phonebook asking for help with social skills, but no real
answers.
In this case, the alleged bombers seemed to be
well-liked. A photoessay of the older alleged bomber from 2 years ago is no longer available online, but
this article has many
photos from it and the key photo captions, such as saying that he has no American friends.
Whatever the reasons for these divergent paths, these patterns emerge during adolescence and young
adulthood, although likely they are forged in
childhood, infancy, and even
before.
Adolescents and young adults are at a turning point in life, and the uncertainty inherent in that transition is often stressful. Here one 19 year old has
put the entire city of Boston on lockdown. He has made a huge negative impact on the
world. In the coming days, we will wonder what could have prevented
him from taking such a destructive path.
We'll probably never know, but thankfully these extreme situations are
rare. More common are adolescents and young adults who destroy their
and others' lives in more quiet ways. UNICEF just released a report ranking the US at the
bottom of rich countries in child well-being, below even
Greece.
The entire nation is transfixed by a single demented individual, while
entire sectors of US society are impoverished in ways that will increase
their propensity for more mundane forms of violence, and we will feel the impact for decades.