The Boston Marathon Bombings and Beyond: Shaping Violent Minds

It’s the middle of the night. My thoughts keep tugging me back from the brink of sleep. I keep thinking about the mother of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Before you read another word, let’s be sure we understand this post is not about sympathy for two accused killers who wreaked havoc at the Boston Marathon  by constructing bombs designed to do as much damage as possible. I feel many emotions: anger, confusion and sadness.

But sympathy for anyone other than the victims, their friends and families is simply beyond my capacity. Maybe later, after time elapses and works the magic of dulling the horror, I’ll be able to feel sympathy for Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, the mother of the two alleged bombers, but not this morning. This morning, I’m wondering how children evolve into killers.

Certainly, we have spent innumerable hours studying behavior. Beginning in 1550 BC, when observations on the mental condition of patients after surgery were committed to papyri and throughout history, over the centuries, many people dedicated their lives to the study of the human mind and mental illness. In the early 1800s, Johann Christian Reil first devised the term “psychiatry,” and nearly 100 years later Sigmund Freud published The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

Not all mental illness includes violence, of course, but that's the kind of activity I'm writing about today.

Patients exhibiting symptoms of mental illness have been and continue to be categorized, medicated, hospitalized, incarcerated, experimented on, tested, restrained, and studied. We’ve come to accept certain theories regarding the violent behavior of men, women and children. We believe certain combinations of circumstances, stimuli and genetics can actually predict individuals prone to violent behavior, and recent research directly links the connection between violent video games and violent behavior.

Does it matter? Through the centuries, the amount of study and research, the time and the money, the energy used and the intelligence of hundreds of thousands of people are unable to stop violent behavior. We still wage war, commit mayhem, and continue to find ever more heinous ways to do harm to other human beings. We discuss trends in violence as if they were a new line of automobiles.

We also are blurring the line between terrorism and murder, home grown and foreign based, gang crime, religious, political or crimes against women and children. We refer to crime prevention as the “War on Crime.” Nationwide, according to the Department of Justice, it appears violent crime is going up, while in Virginia's Prince William County, a 2011 report shows violent crime is down.

It appears violent behavior cannot be stopped. Some types of violent behavior can be curtailed, and since I believe everything in America starts in the neighborhood, that’s my focus. We need rules and laws to guide us. We need leaders we can trust and depend on. We need to separate and focus on what is truly important to our country as a whole, but it all begins at the community level. If only people could put away their self-interest and look toward the common good, could we make progress?

I’ve shared an interview attached to this blog with a young man named Antonio Merrick. What Antonio talks about is curtailing the high rate of crime among young, black males. This link between video games, music and television that glorifies a violent culture is one of the few things we may be able to change. Can we stop the next act of terrorism? Can we swing our violent culture back from the abyss? I don’t know. Antonio thinks we can.