USA and Dunkin' Donuts
USA USA USA USA
Dunkin’ Donuts restaurants were kept open for police and other responders during yesterday’s manhunt in Boston, and TV reporters kept commenting during the lockdown that folks were sneaking out of their houses, running down to Dunkin’ Donuts and racing back home with donuts and coffee. It reminded me: Dunkin’ Donuts is an institution with a special place in the hearts of Bostonians.
My old Navy friend Lieutenant John Shaughnessy, a special buddy who was an MBA student with me at the University of Michigan fifty years ago along with Lieutenant Joe Flores, once told me, “I love Dunkin‘ Donuts” and we often went there for donuts and coffee during long breaks between classes. We both especially liked the cake donut with the little handle on it for dunking. John, and his twin brother, also a naval officer a submariner, was from Boston, a Boston native with that wonderful Boston twang. John stopped by to see me at the rectory in Apalachicola one day, but Linda and I were out of town and missed him. He’s in his eighties now, undoubtedly still loving Dunkin‘ Donuts.
On social media Tamerlan wrote that he did not have one single American friend and did not understand us: an intriguing clue to the man’s mentality and ending. On the other hand, his brother Johar (can’t spell or pronounce Dzhokhar and don't care to learn and he himself spells it Johar on his social media websites) had loads of friends, never met a stranger, as his father said, an angel; Tamerlan’s brother Johar, a promising teenager whom he destroyed.
Every loving parent can understand a panicked father and mother grasping at thin air, insisting their sons were framed and innocent; though their Soviet-era mindset surfaced in hearing them berate authorities and the police. An unrelated, mind-boggling mystery: why on earth, why in the name of God in heaven would sane people (responsible and loving parents?) leave Boston and their four children, one of them still a teenager in school, and move back to Russia after years in the United States? Reading their family history of fleeing from place to place, they seem to have no settled homeland, and America took them in and gave them and their extended families a home. Yet, watching media interviews with the father’s three brothers yesterday, there clearly was some problem in the family that they were estranged, weren’t speaking to each other. A psychologist might discern that the father, though understandably distraught and frantic about his sons when being interviewed on TV yesterday, was an angry man who instead of facing and settling personal issues would “rather be mad” as the saying goes. Like father like son, perhaps.
Links to a couple of very human stories below, first from today’s issue of the Sydney, Australia Morning Herald, second from the New York Times.
Imagine doing such an evil thing to your kid brother and bringing his life down in ruin for whatever self-centered motive or contrived motive, or lack thereof. Their uncle who lives in Maryland had it right when he said “loser” and disgrace. Tamerlan couldn’t make it and so decided to turn against. Against what or whom? Whatever.
Literally, Whatever. Many folks who leave a church and when their church friends don’t understand and ask why they left, contrive a reason, any reason but self. In my last parish a couple whom we welcomed and befriended and incorporated stayed a year or two then quit coming. When we realized it and contacted them, one of the reasons they gave for quitting was, “Father Tom doesn’t shake enough hands during the Peace.” Stupid people can’t see themselves for what they are. Some quit church, some become terrorists.
Any reason that blames other than oneself is sufficient. There's some chip on the shoulder or narcissism to it, ingrained in the personality. Tamerlan and Johar’s parents in a huff leaving America for Russia. Tamerlan becoming disenchanted with life, blaming anyone but himself, recruiting his brother into incomprehensible evil, bringing death, bringing shame and disgrace, and leading foolish people to blame his religion. Thank God, authorities took great care to capture Johar alive. Because what psychologists and others who probe the mind observe about this case could be even more fascinating than what the FBI and other security agencies learn.
And also because Johar is just a year younger than my Kristen, and thinking about their age and maturity similarities, and about how much I love her, and seeing Johar's father's anguish, to have this nightmare bring another death, the death of a young American teenager, who if he wanted to shoot would have done far better with his life to have been fighting as an American soldier, would have added tragedy upon tragedy and sorrow upon sorrow upon desolating sorrow.
So, discovering a teenage boy cowering in a boat in someone’s backyard, making him get out, and taking him, alive, to hospital for treatment, is as American as life gets.
Tamerlan -- in the end a loser who destroyed not only other people and himself, but his own brother who backed over him with a Mercedes SUV as he fled in panic -- Tamerlan contrived to hate us instead of looking in the mirror. But when it was all over last night, and the nightmare was ended, the chant of the Boston crowd said it all. USA USA USA USA USA USA USA USA USA USA
TW