Life is not Fair

Elliot Rodger, the most recent volatile weirdo who will gain a certain form of insidious infamy for all the wrong reasons, thought that life was out to get him. I won't encourage you to scour his manifesto or take a closer look at his repetitive, rambling video diatribes in which he laments his lack of female companionship or connection with the world around him.

The Today Show ran a synopsis of this guy's general worldview. Just like Rodger himself, his outlook is neither healthy nor realistic. He falls back on the lazy regurgitation of the unseen and unidentified "them" and "they"--all of those oppressive societal forces that conspired to keep him a 22-year-old virgin and ostracize him from the rest of the world.

Man, give it a rest. 

You stabbed three people, then went on a rampage in a BMW no doubt provided to you by your wealthy father. Your misogynistic ramblings and anger toward women and happy couples is pathetic. Girls won't talk to you at a party? Oh, so the answer then should be to push them from a 10-foot ledge in your "dark, hate-fueled rage."

This guy feels invisible. He feels alone. He feels neglected.

How do you think the families of those he murdered feel? I can tell you that Richard Martinez, the father of one of the victims (who was shot because he had the temerity to frequent a convenience store in this psycho's path of destruction), is fed up. 

Rodger should have never had a gun. His own parents called the police on him three times in the last year, when his spooky youTube ramblings became more than a little unsettling.

Said Richard Martinez:

“Why did Chris die? Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the N.R.A.,” he said. “They talk about gun rights. What about Chris’s right to live? When will this insanity stop? When will enough people say, ‘Stop this madness; we don’t have to live like this?’ Too many have died. We should say to ourselves: not one more.”

This is another terrible national story, and we'll file it right up there with what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary and Columbine and Virginia Tech. You know the commonality in those three stories? Mentally ill people with grudges against nobody in particular and access to guns. 

But there's nothing wrong with our system for regulating access to firearms, right? It works just fine...

Rodger laments the things that his father never told him. He claims that his old man never told him how to "get girls," like women are something you just browse for at Costco or stalk on the rolling plains of female land before stuffing them in a sack and taking them home. 

How about this, weirdo? You make your own luck. Life's not fair, but you had advantages. You were attending a nice school near California's beaches. You had two parents who were at least concerned enough about you to attempt to enlist help from others in the interests of your general welfare. 

The sad reality is that there are scads of people like Rodger out there (and like Cho, and Harris, and Klebold, and Lanza, and...), and the innocent people in their paths of destruction don't stand a chance. Richard Martinez is right: we lack the cultural will to protect the general population from delusional folks like Rodger who, despite his considerable advantages, never understood a principle that most of us learn at the age of five: Life is not fair.

Life is not fair, and a person has to make his or her own luck. Blaming your own failings on social forces that you can never quite identify and then killing others indiscriminately in your own violent meltdown merely exposes you as the petulant, culturally obtuse child that you are.

Culture didn't make you that way. You did it to yourself, and then you confirmed your condition in perpetuity by acting out your own self-fulfilling prophecy...