Bumping Into the Elephant

Why is it so hard for people to see the Elephant in the Room?

As a culture we doggedly focus on the wrong symptoms. No wonder why we misdiagnose all of our cultural illnesses. If you have a headache, looking at your feet isn't going to help figure out how to reduce your pain. In trying to understand the recent spate of mass murders, we are looking in all the wrong places...

The issue of mass murders committed by young, disenchanted men, using high power firearms is the subject of much speculation: What causes these people to take such inhumane actions to gain notoriety to cover their anger and pain for being 'different?'

Is it poverty and class envy? Is it the effects of bullying or sexual identity conflict? Is it despair over the loss of control or social dominance?
Is it the easy accessibility of cheap handguns, the nefarious influence of the NRA, or just the right wing emphasis on ignoring the plight of the underclass?

The problem with that reasoning is that all of these conditions exist for millions and millions of people who never commit heinous human executions! But they are not.

The Elephant in the Room is the killers, on the surface, appear to be uniquely normal young men.

They have friends, they attend school or at least have recently been involved in regular public activities. Yes they are often loners, but they seldom have a history of arrests or violence. They are typically products of broken homes, with a history of bizarre and self-centered abusive behaviour, and who are almost always spoiled/abused by single or separated parents who have no idea of how to temper selfish actions that show no concern for others, for norms or authority, and who substitute their friendship and coddling, or conversely their anger and psychological abuse, for parental nurturing and discipline.

Add into the petri dish our cultural devaluation of marriage and the formation of the nuclear family as an iconic and imperative tradition of child-rearing. Throw in socially accepted disrespect for unborn children, the institutionalization of abortion and 'new normal' acceptance of abandonment by career seeking mothers and overtly ambitious father's. Then toss in widespread abuse of drugs and alcohol and the substitution of human care by television, nannies, and digital diversions.

The message these admittedly ill young men get is, 'who cares about you and your problems? You are just an obstacle to our pleasure! We gave birth to you, what else do you want from us?'

Stitch this all together, and you get a Young Frankenkiller!

The 'new normal' pattern of early abandonment by career ambitious parents, further eroded by angry, disparaging left-wing academia, has insidiously pulled the floor out from under many mentally discouraged and or impaired boys who are going through the evolution from adolescence to manhood, historically a difficult and unpredictable life changing period. In our youth oriented culture, manhood is elusive and ill defined, and then popularly trashed as a convention of male misogyny. Unstable boys are left to navigate a dark and threatening landscape of unknown performance expectations, loneliness and disillusionment. In some cases, they are given psychoactive mood altering drugs that can have devastating side effects including hallucinations and suicidal tendencies.

No wonder these confused-boy killers are psychopathic!

Mass murder by young men is only one of many subjects our media completely misrepresent. Either through ignorance, apathy, or in most cases due to a cultural practice of historical miseducation and purposeful twisting of the facts to push a social agenda, and to deflect blame. These journalists come from the same generation of leaders in 'modern' child development and educational egalitarianism.

Today's so-called 'enlightened' journalists and educators educated in the halls of our hijacked advanced educational system, have been convinced they are destined to reinvent and culturally advance a generation that has been moribund by their outdated conservatism and Judeo-Christian hegemony. It is in their purview to promote and justify asymmetrical lifestyles, single and helicopter parenting, recreational drug use, sexual multiplicity, humanism, and all kinds of self centered activities that have historically been viewed as irresponsible, and, well, Ungodly...

We parents rationalize that we gave them everything, that we loved them unconditionally, and that we are proud of their achievements! Just look at all the awards posted on their facebook pages! Sorry if we have little time to play, but we have to make a living!

Everything would be OK, we think, if we had more gun control, free access to drugs, healthcare, food, housing, education, computers and cellphones, and less 'prehistoric' judgmentalism of modern concepts of gender, family and religion. If our capitalist society was more tolerant, generous and less focused on materialism, maybe these loner-killers could fit in better...

Why are we unwilling to admit our child rearing inventions have backfired? The now well established curriculum of pushing high self esteem, noncompetitive collaboration and non judgmentalism has produced a generation of narcissistic kids who can't deal with adversity or workplace competition, or accept authority. They are insecure about their sexuality, their reason for being and their ability to relate to human love. They act as though they are at the end of their tether....and for the worst cases that end up in tragedy, they have been for years.
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Every time we witness another school-place massacre, we bump into that Elephant again...