The Vortex
Re: the VT shooting --
So all the chirpy media types are going on about "how could this happen?" I want to smack them upside the head and say, "Fuckin' DUH". Another poor kid was teetering on the brink of the abyss of rage, alienation and despair, and fell in. It was suicide. Only he decided to take other students with him, which is the difference between him and, say, a random student who might have hung himself or taken pills. You never hear about those kids on the national news, because they go quietly. This one decided to go with a splash.
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From "Dark Matter: The Psychology Of Mass Murder" in today's Post:
"They're not looking for highs -- they're depressed, angry and humiliated. They tend to be rejected in some romantic relationship, or are sexually incompetent, are paranoid, and their resentment builds. They develop shooting fantasies for months or years, stockpiling dreams and ammunition. The event that finally sets them off, Welner says, is usually anticlimactic -- an argument, a small personal loss that magnifies a sense of catastrophic failure.
"But they don't 'snap,' as you so often hear people say," Welner says. "It's more like a hinge swings open, and all this anger comes out."
They plan everything about the killings, he says, except how to get away.
"It's about suicide," Welner says. "It's about tying one's masculinity to destruction."
It's also rare for them to be truly psychotic, he says."
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So. Alienation, disconnection, frustration, rage. Modern dis-eases, sicknesses of the soul.
Most of us dance around the vortex. Many of us develop ways to cope. Some don't. The difference between the shooter and the rest of us isn't that big. Or maybe the difference is that we're hanging on to hope with our fingernails. Dostoyevski's little oak leaves in the spring, the damned dandelions popping up their optimistic yellow heads despite death, destruction and Roundup. You just have to keep going.
So all the chirpy media types are going on about "how could this happen?" I want to smack them upside the head and say, "Fuckin' DUH". Another poor kid was teetering on the brink of the abyss of rage, alienation and despair, and fell in. It was suicide. Only he decided to take other students with him, which is the difference between him and, say, a random student who might have hung himself or taken pills. You never hear about those kids on the national news, because they go quietly. This one decided to go with a splash.
--------------------------------------------------------------
From "Dark Matter: The Psychology Of Mass Murder" in today's Post:
"They're not looking for highs -- they're depressed, angry and humiliated. They tend to be rejected in some romantic relationship, or are sexually incompetent, are paranoid, and their resentment builds. They develop shooting fantasies for months or years, stockpiling dreams and ammunition. The event that finally sets them off, Welner says, is usually anticlimactic -- an argument, a small personal loss that magnifies a sense of catastrophic failure.
"But they don't 'snap,' as you so often hear people say," Welner says. "It's more like a hinge swings open, and all this anger comes out."
They plan everything about the killings, he says, except how to get away.
"It's about suicide," Welner says. "It's about tying one's masculinity to destruction."
It's also rare for them to be truly psychotic, he says."
--------------------------------------------------------------
So. Alienation, disconnection, frustration, rage. Modern dis-eases, sicknesses of the soul.
Most of us dance around the vortex. Many of us develop ways to cope. Some don't. The difference between the shooter and the rest of us isn't that big. Or maybe the difference is that we're hanging on to hope with our fingernails. Dostoyevski's little oak leaves in the spring, the damned dandelions popping up their optimistic yellow heads despite death, destruction and Roundup. You just have to keep going.
posted by Corbie at 4:57 AM
1 Comments:
Finally, a sane voice in the wilderness.
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