A systemic failure

The opinions that follow are my own, and nobody else's.

On Friday, May 23, 22-year-old Elliot Rodger stabbed three people to death at his apartment in Isla Vista, California. He then got in to his car and drove, fatally shooting three more people and wounding 13 others, primarily attractive women, until he killed himself via gunshot. He left behind more than 100 pages of ramblings blaming everyone but himself, how he planned to destroy "everything he cannot have" because he was, in his words, a "kissless virgin."

Rodger's idea of a dream girl (Google Image)

Since then, all I have seen is anger. 

Don't get me wrong, anger is certainly justified in this case, but I have seen many forms of anger. Anger at the act, anger at the lives lost, anger at the male-centric culture that would produce someone like Rodger, who apparently believed women have no use outside of being a pretty possession to be owned. 

People are going to be angry, because anger is part of the mourning process. It's how the human animal deals with and reacts to shock. However, it cannot be all we have. 

Rodger, for his many many flaws, was still a person. According to reports, he was a deeply troubled person, reportedly having been in and out of mental therapists' offices since before he hit puberty. 

Listening to my friends who speak about what Rodger did, a lot of anger has been expressed over his male sexual entitlement. One, who I won't name without his permission and I don't agree with all the time, but I highly respect, described him as "a rich white dude who felt absolutely entitled to women's bodies for his personal pleasure and, not getting what he wanted, (who) advocated for a holocaust of all women and forced breeding."

That may be true, however that is not all there is at work here, and just dismissing a mentally disturbed individual as a male chauvanist pig is doing a disservice to all of the people whose lives were affected by Rodger's final acts.

Certainly, Rodger didn't feel a sexual possessiveness towards his three male roommates, murdered in cold blood because they were "too loud" and played "too many video games." In my uneducated opinion, Rodger may have grafted on to his sexual frustrations, however that's just a symptom of his true sickness.

Why had Rodger stopped seeing a therapist? When the police checked on him at the family's request because of his suicidal social media posts, why were those not taken in to account when the decision was made to not involuntarily commit him for evaluation? Why was someone with such a long history of mental trouble allowed to own a gun? 

We can yell about the injustices and the failures of our culture until we're blue in the face, and yelling may make us feel better, but yelling will change nothing. Discussion breeds ideas, but discussion alone will change nothing.

We need to actually work to put policies and systems in place that people like Rodger get the help and treatment they need, and are not simply forgotten by a society that treats mental illness as a joke. We need to take an active role in the lives of our children, making sure that what we teach them and what we produce for them to watch, read and listen teach them that women and men are the same (beyond the obvious reproductive role differences) and that one is not something to be owned by the other. 

Most of all, we have to realize and accept that change, true change, takes a collective effort over a very long time, working together as a society. Not yelling at each other to assign blame, not taking the easiest or the cheapest route, and not putting other interests over the overall societal good. 

I am not a religious sort, but if I were, I'd have no doubt that there would be no forgiveness in this life or the next for what Rodger did. It is up to us to work to ensure that it doesn't happen again.