Normalizing Hatred

On November 19th, an individual entered Club Q, a nightclub in Colorado Springs, CO that catered to a LGBTQ clientele, and started shooting. He killed five and shot 19 more before being subdued by some of the club's patrons.

Three days later, an individual working as a night manager at a Walmart in Chesapeake, VA, started shooting his co-workers. He killed six and injure four more before reportedly turning the gun on himself.

As usual, partisan makers-of-hay (as opposed to haymakers) didn't even wait for a full set of facts to emerge before narrativizing (yes, that is indeed a word) the individuals' actions.

Always about the guns, of course, as if restricting the rights of the law abiding has ever actually worked in deterring criminal behavior.

Their narratives ran into a couple inconveniences. Right off the bat, there's the fact that the Chesapeake shooter was a black man. It's only angry white men, upset at the woke world's deconstructing of their privilege and undeservedly-elevated stature, that lash out in mass-shooter fashion, dontchaknow. While the disaffected loner profile does apply, people have been killed by 'mass shooters of color,' to follow the woke style guide.

Things got even worse for the identity-mongers when the Colorado Springs shooter's attorney informed the world that the shooter was non-binary, and used 'they-them' pronouns. Indeed, one CNN anchor almost committed the terminal offense of overtly questioning the shooters self-identification, stopping just short of claiming the individual was lying to gain sympathy or work a defense angle.

Such shock is a result of the (risible) belief that one's identity define's one's politics - and one's behavior as well. Thus, massive cognitive dissonance is instigated by the notion of a non-binary individual committing mass murder in an LGBTQ night club.

Hand-in-hand with the "identity = beliefs" stance is the normalizing of hatred for "other." Liberals and conservatives have always had fractious relations in America (and across the world), but the real, bile-spitting hatred has usually been restricted to the fringe elements on both sides of the aisle. Nowadays, real hatred (as opposed to simple derision for "others'" politics) is front-and-center on cable television and social media

.The prominent purveyors of that hatred want to focus it on their political counterparts, but when it comes to the mentally unstable (as I'd assert anyone who plans and commits random mass murder must be), "other" can escape the puppet-masters' control much too easily.

In time, we will learn more about the Colorado Springs shooter, who will stand trial, and about the Chesapeake shooter, who per reports was 'a problem' and paranoid and the like. The former, it's emerging, was on law enforcement radar (does this sound familiar) well before going on his rampage, and had discussed plans to gain infamy by blowing up a government building of some sort. The reasons for his choice of target, as well, may become clearer with time. The latter, it’s being reported, was a paranoiac who had a “manifesto” on his phone, what’s purported to be a “kill list,” and had voiced threats years ago. In both cases, the individuals’ motives will take a while to sort out, and we can better comprehend their individual “why’s” - at least as far as mentally ill people can have such - in the context of current society. We can and should also ask about law enforcement’s past encounters and inaction with one or both of these individuals.

As to current society…

This past May, after a mass shooting in Uvalde, TX, where law enforcement fecklessness left a shooter of children unchecked for over an hour, I asked "why? What has changed?" Because such mass shootings didn't happen half a century or more ago, despite easier access to guns (you could mail-order a rifle in the 1950s, and the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) system and requirement for all commercial firearm purchases didn’t come into effect until 1993.

A Hard Heart

Today I remain more convinced than ever that this phenomenon is the offspring of cultural shifts toward a collectivist view of people, where individuals are subordinate to their identities, where "what" you are is more important than "who" you are. This has served to magnify tribalism, to normalize hatred of "other," and to nudge those at a mental-illness cusp to embrace victimhood to the point of violence against others. The individual is subordinate to the identity group.

It's a societal sickness, wrought by those who have claimed sole knowledge of how to cure society. Until we stop teaching people that "you are your identity, and your future is defined by it" and start teaching them "you are individuals, and your future is yours to make," we will not resolve the lash-out-with-violence problem.

Such teaching won’t stop, though, because the teachers would have to admit they’ve gotten things totally wrong, and do a full about-face on identity politics. So, we will get “do-something” demands for change that will do nothing, or perhaps even less than nothing, to remedy the problem.

Expect to hear more demands for gun control, little or no mention of either mental illness or mainstream cultural culpability, and far too little demand for accountability from those who knew but didn't act - or from those who tell us all that hating those who don’t agree with you is necessary and proper. Because it's easy to blame an out-of-favor segment of the citizenry than to admit that, perhaps, teaching people to hate isn't such a good idea.

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Peter