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.