He is young enough to be my son

The eight-year-old boy who died. The nineteen-year-old boy who likely killed him.

Or they could have been my students, a sibling. She may have smiled that beautiful smile over my lunch. He wanted to serve and protect. He wanted us to stop hurting people. She came here to learn. 

These people, living and dead, cause me pain. So yes, I want to know them. Not to exploit, or glorify, or justify, or apologize, or excuse. No. I want to know because I want to understand. I want to know why. I want to know if something could have been done to help angry young men with hate in their hearts to see a different path. Because I have the imagination of a mother. And the rage, and the heartbreak, and the ache. They are children. They have mothers. No mother looks at her baby’s face and imagines she will suffer in this particular way. No mother looks at her baby’s face and imagines he will unleash pain and death and torment. So how does that capacity for hatred grow? Where does it begin? I tell myself — the way we do — that my boys are different. But in this way or in that way, they are the same. And I have the imagination of a mother. And the guilt, and the worry.  

If we try to understand, if we seek to know, could we identify other children on a path that could be redirected, could be supported, be SEEN and treated as human and valuable, so they could see and treat others as human and valuable? So that our children will grow — whole, and alive — and without hate in their hearts. 

And still I’m talking about a bomb and a gunfight that killed four people and maimed so many others. For hate, yes. Which is terrible. No doubt. 

But what about the bomb that killed fourteen and destroyed so much in a tiny town? That bomb that people prefer to call a factory or business. That bomb that exploded not for malice but for what? Negligence or profit? That bomb that was not set by radicalization but is so much more eminently preventable if we give it the attention it deserves. So much more readily mitigated. But strangely not causing the same level of anger. I look out at the stacks of refineries and factories within my horizon, and I imagine possibilities. 

So many questions here and there and elsewhere. I can imagine something different. I can imagine something better. But first we have to be willing to value those lives, to look at them, ALL of them, to see them, to ask questions, and at every step to be humane and just.