Mark Kennedy
It's been 10 days now since the shootings that wounded our city, and it feels like it's time to move on.
But for those of us who are the parents of young children - especially boys - "moving on" is not really an option. Not yet, anyway.
My older son, 13, was born six weeks after the 9/11 attacks, and I've always thought of him as being in the first wave of American children born into the frightening world of domestic terrorism.
As a child of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war was ever-present in my boyhood. But domestic terrorism is different; so close now in Chattanooga that we can almost smell its breath.
On the night of July 16, I took my older son aside and asked him if he had questions about the shootings here that day that would ultimately lead to the deaths of five American servicemen. If he was stewing about anything, I wanted to know. I noticed that he was unusually quiet, which usually means he is thinking.
He was interested in the timeline of the day's events, and I told him all that I knew. He seemed afraid to ask much more, perhaps because it would reveal his fears. He, his brother and his mother were inside a locked store on Brainerd Road as news of the nearby shootings was unfolding.
The night of the shootings, as I struggled to fall asleep, my despair flowed in two ways, to the children of the dead - who had been left fatherless - and to the parents of the shooter, whose hearts, I imagined, had been shredded.
Part of me braced for what I knew would come next: high emotions and instant analysis. These things follow a predictable pattern as people attempt to frame mass shootings according to their own core beliefs.
I knew that some would frame the shootings as the clash of world religions. Case closed.
Others, I knew, would see it as an open-and-shut Second Amendment case, preventable only by more guns, or fewer guns, depending on their points of view.
Still others would look for political advantage in assigning blame, a line of thinking that would devolve into a complicated debate about the precise definition of terrorism.
Still others would probe the shooter's mental state and look for motives. To many - and I understand this impulse - talking about the shooter, at all, is seen as an insult to the innocents who were killed. Some are content to see the shootings as a random act, and the shooter as merely an instrument of evil.
I get all that, and even sympathize with those emotions. But parents of boys have to deal with this fact, too: Another young American male has chosen to become a mass murderer. Another boy among us has gone from being a shy, but apparently likeable, teen to a murderous young adult.
From the beginning, I have had a hunch that this shooter's motives were both personal and political. I think this is what some might call an "honor suicide," fed perhaps by a radical jihadist theology that provided a way to end his shame and earn martyrdom in one bloody morning. (This idea seems to be gaining traction. It has now been reported that the shooter searched the Internet to determine if "martyrdom" would "lead to forgiveness for his sins.")
In some cultures, the idea of the redemptive suicide has a long history.
Consider this passage from an article last summer in Psychology Today: "Suicide has long been a way to preserve one's family honor in Asia. Unlike the West, where religions like Christianity view suicide as a sin, suicide among Asian countries is seen as a means of atoning for disgrace, defeat, or any other dishonorable action or event."
Granted, the shooter was not Asian, but a naturalized American citizen with family roots in Jordan. Still, he may well have used the promise of "martyrdom" - as he understood it - as his escape hatch for personal failings. By all accounts, the shooter's life was spiraling downward at the time of the murders. Caught between his strict faith and temporal temptations, faith was losing.
It doesn't seem like a stretch to assume that he was deeply shamed by his drug use, his near bankruptcy and his failure to adhere to the laws of his faith. Anyone with a fundamentalist religious background will understand how shame snowballs.
So what good does it do to probe the dead killer's motive?
Because, if we truly want to stop the madness, we have to deploy our minds and our faiths as well as our emotions.
Parents, please hold your sons close. Search their eyes. Don't always take "I'm OK" for an answer. Investigate. Rescue. Dive into the mess.
Encourage them daily, even after they leave home to find their footing in the world. And, if it's your nature, pray for them until your eyelids hurt. Pray, specifically, that our boys come to understand that violence against themselves or others is never a painkiller nor a path to glory, but a one-way ticket into a pit of despair.
So, no, 10 days is not enough time for us to "move on" from this.
Nor, for that matter, is 10 years.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.