remembered a mock debate where their teacher made students stand on one side of the classroom or another to signal their allegiance. “The majority of the class were on the liberal side, but Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side,” Smith said. “That’s still the picture I have of him. Just standing alone on one side while the rest of the class was on the other.”
Gonna do some armchair psychoanalyzing because that’s what everyone is going to be doing over the next couple days. He probably was a old fashioned Republican conservative, small government, guns rights etc. who was a loner. Whenever he tried to speak to his beliefs his classmates would always just respond with some dumb things trump said and he’d get frustrated and point to him as the reason no one took him seriously.
It is pretty simple and something a lot of men suffer from. You end up being nice try to follow the rules. The problem is that when you follow the rules all the time, you end up having to compromise a lot. Unfortunately Western culture stereotype of men is that of a strong silent hero, who does not complain. So quite a few never talk about there problems. Mostly it is just suffering, if it becomes really bad it ends up with a suicide and this is really the worst case. Basically they end up thinking that they are losers anyway, of which everybody is ignoring their needs, because quite frankly they often do. So this is the way to do something “great”, a way to stick out, to become famous.
Obviously not just a male problem, but you just have to look at who statistically commits suicide and mass shootings, to see the problem.
Yes, America doesn’t randomly have these shootings. We’re a sick society with deep fundamental problems. It’s some kind of dark alchemy of hopelessness, pressure/bullying, and celebrity culture. The darkness grows inside until it has to be inflicted somehow. Best case it’s a suicide. Worst case they decide to become famous before they go.
Corollary to that, we wouldn’t even know how sick we were if some of us hadn’t gotten better.
That’s the state we are in right now. There’s a growing consciousness that we should hold ourselves to a higher standard as a society, and the parts of us that have profited immensely and grown used to the old way of doing things are resisting the change.
We’re like any person who is on the pathway to salvation, our old sinful selves are actively fighting against the renewing of our minds by the desire to be better.
It’s easy for the part of us that has gotten better to hate our old selves and the parts of us that remain stuck in our old ways, and it’s easy for our old selves to hate the work and effort it takes to change who We are.
This is one aspect of what is commonly called “toxic masculinity”. It negatively affects the men that hold these harmful believes a lot.
But a huge portion of this is also driven by a warped sense of what masculinity is to begin with, which is pushed largely by conservative culture. I was raised in a fairly progressive area and never felt isolated or like I was unable to show vulnerability. This is not a US problem as much as a conservative one.
I’m still sad that this probably awkward boy got lured into that shit, shot at the crowd and got his head popped by a sniper. We wouldn’t know at what stage he could’ve been helped. He’s lost now. And there are many boys like him who can take a gun and spray whoever with it, who can be saved as are their possible victims. There should be something to help his peers or otherwise this chaotic violence would continue, not like in Trump’s case but like in regular shootings it somehow overshadowed.
Couple facts according to BBC early reports:
- gunman was a registered republican
- gunman donated $15 to the dems
FWIW. Ideology could be either way based on that info. People sometimes register for the opposing party as a tactic to vote in the primaries for the weaker candidate (less likely to win). Donating to dems could either mean allegiance to dems or it could just as well be a true conservative who hates Trump (because true conservatives tend to oppose Trump as well over Trump’s disregard for antitrust situations and his sloppy spending). A Trump-hating republican would also likely register as republican to vote against Trump in the primaries.
The donation appears to have been done by the similarly named 69-year old Thomas Crooks, not gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks.
gunman donated $15 to the dems
What I heard is that he donated to a Democrat-affiliated “get out the vote” group on the day Biden was inaugurated. It’s true that the donation was to “the dems,” but it sounds to me like the motivation could’ve been dissatisfaction with the voter turnout that resulted in Biden entering office. Maybe he just didn’t know that higher turnout tends to favor Democrats…
As the other commenter mentioned, there seems to be a 69yo similarly named man in a different Pennsylvania town that made that donation.
The donation record has 20yo Crooks’ address, not 69yo Crooks’ address, so that’s not likely. I don’t know why $15 makes him a secret democrat, when there’s so much more evidence he’s deeply conservative. It shouldn’t be an issue.
Or he lost a bet.
