The Broken Among Us

I get frustrated every time I read a story about another violent, angry young man who is bitter at the world for not giving him what he felt he deserved so he lashes out at people and hurts or kills them out of blind rage. 

Angry that he didn’t have a significant other, that he wasn’t having sex, that he didn’t have friends, that no one cared about him, and on and on and on. 

I get frustrated because in many, many ways I was that kid and I never became that way. 

Because there are LOTS of people that feel that way but that don’t weaponize their upset and aim it at the world. 

And I hate that this sort of thing is embraced by others like them, as a sort of fanclub for hate. They won’t support one another, but they’ll support each other’s hate. 

That says a lot of about those men, doesn’t it?

Feelings of isolation, loneliness, depression, and confusion about your place in the world are valid. Are reasonable. Are COMMON. I spent my teen years wishing I was cool. Wishing I was different. Wishing people liked me. Wishing people noticed me. Wishing this girl or that would want to fall in love with me. 

It never happened. 

I was a kid with depression problems and suicidal ideations and I was a mess. 

I had friends but the closest moved away and so I was very lonely. I turned my feelings inward. 

I didn’t want to punish the world for how I felt, I wanted to punish myself for not being what the world wanted. 

Those feelings and that mindset lasted until I was around twenty, when I started to make more friends, started to see more of the world, started to feel more at ease in my skin and because of all of those things, met someone. 

The thing is, and I can say that now, it didn’t take meeting someone to make me happy. It was just something rad that happened along the way. It was really seeing the world, that there was more to the world than high school, and the small town I grew up around. 

It was once I started to meet different people and started to forge my own personality that I started to realize that I wasn’t as awful as I thought I was. 

I get it. 

Life is lonely. 

MISERABLY lonely. 

And I will never be one to espouse – you don’t need someone to be happy – because it sounds hollow since I am married with a kiddo. The sad fact is though that if you can’t see anything to love in yourself, odds are you will meet someone who won’t see love in you either or who will leave because your love for them is still infected with self hate. 

Few people want to be the one light in someone’s life, they want to be the lead of the orchestra that the person hears in life. They want to be the star of the show but not the whole cast. 

An issue here is society and our obsession with romantic love and pairing up and you are incomplete without a partner. 

NO. 

YOU AREN’T!

YOU need YOU. 

The rest is all the stuff that echoes the beauty in the world, sure, but friends can fulfill you, family can, pets can, YOU can. 

Romantic love is amazing, sex is great, but you don’t need either of those to be complete and shame on us for projecting that it’s that way. 

IT ISN’T!

But we tell one another that and that you need to have someone on your arm to be whole. 

And a man has to be virile and strong to be a MAN. 

PAH, sensitivity!

It bothers me to no end though that we deny toxic masculinity when it’s around us all the time and pops its vile head out any time one of these men go on a shooting spree. 

This idea that ANYONE, let alone women, owe them anything, is nonsense. 

It’s fantasy. 

Women and girls are saddled with so many things from men and one another – they have to look this way, and act this way, and they can’t be this way or they’re a slut, and they owe someone this, and they shouldn’t do that. 

We have so many rules for them yet boys and men just get to live their best lives and then shrug and say, man, it’s hormones, not my fault. 

We obsess over how scary it is for men to live in a world of consent as if this is a new thing. 

As if consent is new. 

I am sorry for anyone who is lonely and desperate. 

I wish we were a nation that embraced mental health and care more readily and didn’t act like it was weakness. The thing is though that your actions are your own and your responsibility. No one goes to jail but you. No one is the villain but you. 

Despite what a group of faceless incels behind a computer screen and on a messageboard may say, they aren’t friends or bros or they’d look out for you, not cheer on your violence. 

It’s horrifying that we are this far down the hole that we have groups that are near to cults that just thrive on their hatred and misogyny but here we are. 

Sure. 

Women are the problem. 

That’s totally what this is about. 

As someone who held more than a few candles in the wind, who got stood up and let down and broken up with and rejected and all of it, it’s not them. 

It’s us. 

Women have enough problems without men saddling them with guilt over their not putting out. 

And there’s that too, isn’t there. 

The idea that these men aren’t mad they are alone but mad they aren’t getting laid. If that’s the case, go pay for it. 

If you don’t want a partner, then seriously, go watch porn or pay for it. 

Lordt. 

I mourn a world that has allowed itself to embrace such rage as we see so often now. We are led by people who work harder to obfuscate and misdirect than they do serving us. The masters they serve are the lobbyist dollars that pay for their extravagant lifestyles. You can’t bring up the idea that we need more mental health care or you’re called out about being a Lefty. Or if you propose that maybe it’s not normal for people to amass guns or even have weapons made for war then you are a weak liberal. 

We demonize one another and in so doing, we are creating real life demons set on destroying the world and each time it happens there’s another angry young man that watches the television and nods to themselves and starts making their list. 

Kids shouldn’t have to live in fear of being gunned down because someone was radicalized by faithless idiots who are driven by greed and avarice. Kids shouldn’t have to adapt to a world of horror because we love our guns more than we love them. Women shouldn’t have to make sure they have a weapon on them in case they are attacked. They shouldn’t have to make sure they don’t dress in a way that may make a man think she’s available or interested. They shouldn’t have to change how they act because someone may get the wrong idea and hurt them. 

We shouldn’t just accept a world like this. 

But we do. 

And as another nasty election plays out and leads to another and another and another and the angry young men of the world raise their fists into the air and rack their rifles or cock their guns with the other one, things are only going to get worse. 

…c…