The Terrible Rage

It's not what you think it is.

These are not huge, conspiratorial organizations carrying out political and social agendas.  Oh, those things exist.  The Paris attack was coordinated by a group.  Not a huge group, but a group nonetheless.

But what we've had in the United States is almost entirely lone wolfs.

Oh, sure.  They get excuses for their darkness by things they find on the Internet, or other material/propaganda that enhances their delusions.  But it's mostly to give them an excuse for their dark tangents.

The attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic?  The man was using abortion as an excuse to exercise his anger at women, at his inability to control them or hold their interest. The intensity about abortion was just a focal point for his anger.  Do violent men who want to control women really care about the unborn?  I doubt it.

Murdering African-American parishioners in their own church?  One loner, young and confused, not fitting in, concludes there must be an external cause for his failure.  He finds propaganda that justifies his feelings - the government is interfering with his ability to succeed by giving others a leg up over him by the virtue of the color of their skin.  So he tries to start a race war for which he is the lone soldier.  But he actually does the opposite, as the forces of love and forgiveness prove to be stronger than hate, and the negatively-charged Confederate flag finally comes down.

In San Bernardino, a man looking for targets settles for the co-workers that have pissed him off, and not given him the recognition he is due.  His allegiances to radical Middles Eastern political movements, his twisting of a basically peaceful faith, are merely used to justify going "postal".  He is a loner, with the exception of a complicit spouse.  They live in a bubble of their own anger.

In Orlando, humanity's Pulse is attacked and slaughtered in an horrific fashion, leaving dozens of beautiful lives cut short, and dozens more wounded, and millions traumatized.  He uses ISIS style allegiance at the last minute, almost as an afterthought.  His motives have not yet become clear, but it is obvious that he was angry and conflicted, perhaps battling feelings within himself that his family and culture were not able to handle.  His wife, either by terror and devotion, may have assisted in some way.  We;ll see over time.  But it is clear that his choice of target was not happenstance.  It was an attack on the LGBT community, without question.

Yes, the voices that encourage violence and hatred must be quieted.  But these men are often using that as a cover to justify their own insecurities, a deep seated anger that goes beyond politics and religion.  It is an inner rage to reassert masculine dominance, a primal cry to subjugate.

You can see the the same thing in less headline grabbing situations throughout the world.  Domestic abuse, workplace sexual harassment, unequal pay, anger at minorities and the LGBT community, even the horrors of rape - these are reflections of the ugly side of  the struggle of male supremacy.

These are made worse in the United States by the ease of access to guns, and magnified by our inability to ban or restrict access to brutal weapons that accelerate our killing incidents to rapid mass slaughter.

Today's blog is not really to present solutions, although I hope to address that, and if one looks at other postings I have done, they may be able to glean what I feel may help.  But I did want to stress this -

It's not completely about politics and religion.  Those are often used as cover for other problems.  So it does no good to demonize Muslims or minorities or Conservative Christians or any group.

We have to get to the terrible rage and start dealing with that.