Steve Hynd ponders the derangement of three angry men from Kentucky who murdered a drug dealer because they wanted to “rid the world of evil” and how there are way too many angry men out there now.
I can’t help but think that it takes a lot of rage at the core to do something like this, rage about perceived injustices and helplessness – and that reminds me of Bob’s question earlier today: “Why are we so angry?” Why is the U.S.A. as a nation so angry right now? What’s wrong with the country and so many of its populace, because this level of rage cannot be healthy, right? Nor can the level of hypocrisy and self-entitlement be healthy. A Marine with a DD and a convicted felon got murderously self-righteous about other people instead of halting their own path to an evil crime with the thought of their own faults. How does that happen?
Steve lives in West Texas, where the white working class and underclass feels seriously screwed over and ignored. Some might say they are whiny. I say, ignore them at your peril.
There’s a lot of “exploding white men” in West Texas, what Bruce Jacobs describes as “an emotional breaking point inherent in the late-capitalist tension between the venerable white male expectation of dominant power and the widespread white male reality of pain and loss and rage”. Gun control, crime, religion, race – they’re all part of and stand as proxies to an underlying zeitgeist.
The scary part is the rage is growing on all sides of the political spectrum. No one is listening much to anything except that which comes through their own particular filters. The center is not holding.