Tamerlan Tsarnaev is dead — killed in a fire fight with Boston-area police — and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is finally in custody.
Last week, as thick gray smoke billowed across the finish line of the Boston Marathon, I was transported momentarily to my fifth-grade classroom as I watched the Twin Towers fold into the New York City sidewalk.
I felt like a bag of bricks had been hung around my neck.
If it was a Muslim, I knew I had to worry for my wife, for my friends, for the inevitable reprisals.
And not just the physical kind but the psychological and unintentional. The low-level pressure constantly building in people’s hearts that makes it hard for women like my wife to walk down the street, to look a cashier in the eye or smile at a stranger.
If it wasn’t a Muslim, that would almost be worse. That would mean a new sort of evil had infiltrated my home, threatened my people — both Muslim and American.
After the bombing, hours dragged into days, and I started to lose sleep constantly refreshing CNN’s homepage.
Sept. 11, Iraq, Afghanistan, friends coming home with mental wounds and physical scars, Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora, Sandy Hook — can’t we have a year or month without this madness, this accelerating chaos?
They all started to blend in my head — Mohamed Atta, Richard Reid and James Holmes — a perverted panoply of horror-bringers.
By Thursday, I had my columns ready to go, and I was set with my canned responses.
I’ve spent the better part of three years beating the drum of interfaith cooperation. I’ve stuck up for my community when wronged and tried my damnedest to show people the Islam that still captures my heart and soul, not the hijacked religion abused by sociopaths.
I was ready: Column A, if it’s an Arab guy, the stereotype — he doesn’t represent who we are!
Column B, the mad militiaman, shame on you America, for thinking Muslims did it — for plastering that poor innocent Saudi kid’s picture across your newspapers and blogs.
What I was not prepared for was Tamerlan and Dzhokhar — the white Chechen refugees who grew up in this country, the sons of a mechanic, the average-looking guys in backpacks and backward hats.
When the names came out, I read through Dzhokhar’s Twitter — the pictures of his cat, his friends talking about “smoking mad blunts,” his love of lifeguarding.
Who are these people, these murderers? Where do they get off being so damn normal?
Erik Rush of Fox News had already tweeted “Kill all the Muslims,” and a Bengali man was jumped and beaten in the streets of New York for “looking Arab.”
And then Thursday night, there was Tamerlan, trading lead with Boston’s finest in the heart of a residential neighborhood, detonating IEDs like it was downtown Kabul — killing another police officer and endangering more innocent people.
Something inside of me broke around 3 that morning.
I realized no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much peace I preached, I could never reach into the hearts of evil men. I cannot stand up to evil armed with good intentions and talking points.
I don’t have an opinion. I don’t know what’s happening to us, and I don’t know what to say. There is no message to this. No shining moral or ray of hope.
I just want off this carousel of bitter hate, constantly revolving, constantly reprising.
I just want off.
Nicholas Pierce is a 23-year old senior in history from Baton Rouge.
