The second-most disturbing thing about this, to me, is that the surviving brother apparently took the oath of citizenship - and thus became an American citizen - on Sept. 11, 2012. And then perpetrated this 7 months later.
These boys grew up here. They were inculcated in the most diverse school in Boston (it apparently boasts having some 83 different nations represented amongst its student body). Dzokar - the surviving brother - was six when he moved here. He should have been as American as any of the rest of us who grew up here. Growing up in Boston, Massachusetts, he should have grown up with the kind of swelling-of-the-chest pride that any child raised to love and respect the miraculous history of freedom and welcome that this nation has for all peoples.
Somehow, our education system failed him. Our education system taught him to hate America and what it stands for. This isn't some under-represented, abused foreigner who got short shrift from America; he had a coveted scholarship to this school, an education that prided itself on its diversity. So he must have learned how rotten, how evil, how undeserving of respect our culture is at least in part at our own schools.
I'm not anti-immigrant. But I am anti-anti-Americanism. And I know my schools, growing up, had this pervasive sense that our history was something of which we, as Americans, should be ashamed. That diversity - respecting others' cultures over and above our own - was all-important, and that we had to atone for our nation's past sins and welcome foreigners not by showing them our unworthy culture, but by showing them that we respected theirs and would not "oppress" it by expecting them to fit in here.
Well, we have proof that that not only doesn't work to make people love us around the world, but that it turns people who should have had every reason to be as American and freedom-loving as anybody reading this post into zealots willing to kill 8-year-olds waiting for their father at the finish line just to stick it to this rotten country.
I'm not blaming anybody but Dzokar and Tamarlane for this heinous act (unless and until evidence comes out that - heaven forbid - this was a larger conspiracy of terrorists), but there is no way a six-year-old child had so much hatred for this nation that he would grow up this way unless something in our own system that was educating him taught him to hate us, rather than welcoming him and teaching him to love his new home as a one-day-to-be fellow-citizen.
