"The friend who rented a flat to the family said the father, Anzor Tsarnaev, was a talented car mechanic and aspired to open his own garage. But he never mastered English, the friend said, or opened his own workspace. He tried to make ends meet by doing odd repair jobs for $10 an hour.
About two years ago, the father was stricken with brain cancer, and departed to Germany last year for treatment, according to a friend of the family.
The family lived modestly in the top floor of a multifamily house on a side street in Cambridge, the friend said, helped partly by Section 8 housing funds and the largesse of their landlord, an elderly woman who also tutored and helped the family place the children in good local schools. The family got some financial help from Mr. Tsarnaev's brother, who was employed by a western oil company in Kazakhstan, said the family friend.
Both boys were good students, the family friend said, but Tamerlan dropped out of community college and was soon drawn into religious matters, he said. Dzhokhar "had a gentler demeanor," the family friend said, but had also apparently taken a deeper interest in religious affairs.
A spokeswoman for Bunker Hill Community College said Tamerlan Tsarnaev was in an accounting program there but didn't receive a degree or certificate."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323809304578432501435232278.html?mod=wsj_share_tweet
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IMO, from a psychological perspective, ironically and tragically, what the uncle Mr. Ruslan Tsarni had called his nephews, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev -- that they are "losers" or rather, how the two brothers perceived themselves as rejects and losers even by their own uncle, his evidently well-adapted “American” family, and by society at large -- might have been the very trigger that broke the last camel's back and set the two brothers on the path of carnage destruction.
The above quotes from the WSJ article paint a very bleak picture of the two suspects' family life. They were rife with economic hardships -- living on Section 8 government funds, their dad with his limited English needing to scrounge for part-time work for meager $10 per hour jobs to make ends meet -- and their dad suddenly stricken with brain cancer 2 years ago which likely skyrocketed the expenses for the poor family, plus from other media sources, the older brother Tamerlan getting married also 2 years ago and having a child and his abandoning the college accounting program at the same time -- all this must have compounded to the brothers'
already heavily negative view about their "station" and "status" in life in America.
No doubt it must have been hard for the family to adapt to America, notwithstanding the language barriers, but particularly as refugees who already felt unwanted, persecuted, and betrayed by their own motherland Chechnya... One can only imagine how desperate and helpless the brothers must have felt, working so darn hard in school trying to better themselves with education and sports and to adapt to the American way of life, only to find that they appeared to be fighting a losing, uphill battle against circumstances they believed were beyond their control -- their dad's brain cancer, Tamerlan’s wife’s having a child perhaps unexpectedly, perhaps Tamerlan was not excelling in school and not making friends the way he wanted to, etc.
I think it’s the convergence of all these factors that precipitated Tamerlan’s need to find an immediate solution to the family plights and thus he became more radical in their religious anti-American views. He was desperate to find a way out of the hole they were in so he sought refuge in the wrong place – radical extremists. My thinking is that when he left the US last year for 6 months and lived in Russia, he met up with extremists who trained him further in their terrorist tactics. And when he returned to the states, he taught his younger brother, Dzhokhar, and Dzhokhar who was said to adore his older brother Tamerlan, followed Tamerlan’s lead, as is evidenced in the video put out by the FBI in which Dzhokhar tags behind carrying his knapsack of explosives, almost skipping happily behind, Tamerlan.
In many ways, their outraged uncle, Mr. Ruslan Tsarni was correct. The two brothers likely felt like "losers" and outcasts even within their own kins. Tragically, it is this very low self-esteem that might have motivated the brothers to seek power and vengeance against the "cruelty" of an "unjust American society". I think their bombings at the Boston marathon as well as the shootouts last night at MIT and Watertown are the brothers’ “F U” to the world.
