I will admit that I spent a great deal of the long Memorial Day weekend thinking about the grim events in the Isla Vista/Santa Barbara community. I’ve lost some sleep and admittedly have had nightmares, because it seems that every news outlet is so saturated with facts and appraisals and opinions about Elliot Rodger - it’s overwhelming to keep hearing these things over and over again.
But the fact is, I think we need to continue hearing them.
Just this morning, I read a news story about YouTube taking down the rest of Rodger’s video blogs, saying that he is “slowly disappearing from the Internet”.
Out of curiosity, I watched most of the videos and they made me sick. They made me squirm. They made me want to cry. But, just like the #YesAllWomen trending topic should continue to be in our consciousness, even after all of this has died down, so too should the trail left by the person whose hatred caused us to dive head-first into these conversations in the first place.
In the days that have followed since the killings in Isla Vista, there has been so much blame flying around, and so much anger when people disagree on who to blame. Some want to blame misogyny. Some want to blame a poor mental healthcare system. Some want to blame laws. The blame is often divvied up and argued about, like this:
And heaven forbid you suggest the burden of guilt or blame is something like this:
But what if, in truth, the blame should look like this?
Causes include everything inside the small circles, and everything outside. We can comb through what's left of Elliot Rodger's Internet footprint and continue asking, what was the cause? The truth is, every single word he spoke or wrote probably tells us the cause.
At the heart of the blame game lies a desire to be able to say, “not me”. There is a desire to distance oneself, to place the focus on how similar we are to the victims, to say yes, this could have happened to me. What is missing from our narrative now, however, is the call for all of us to turn inward and ask, could this have been done by me?
At the heart of the blame game lies a desire to be able to say, “not me”. There is a desire to distance oneself, to place the focus on how similar we are to the victims, to say yes, this could have happened to me. What is missing from our narrative now, however, is the call for all of us to turn inward and ask, could this have been done by me?
There is a sense of “not me” every time we say that this was a crime to be blamed on men, on misogynists, on the mentally ill, on gun advocates. There is so much rhetoric that aims to isolate someone - some group of someones - so we can all sleep better at night. But maybe we all need to lose sleep, to have the nightmares, to realize that though we want to feel connected to the victims and feel like the perpetrator exists in a world apart from our own, we are one with the perpetrator just as much as the victims.
Elliot Rodger was a 22-year-old who was shaped by the same conditions, the same world we have all been shaped by. There have been so many "Amen, yes!" reactions among people who have felt victimized as women at the hands of men who feel entitled to their bodies - because this a valid and terrifying truth. But even so - it doesn't excuse women as a whole from needing to ask themselves, could I have been Elliot Rodger?
You can gasp and point fingers in indignation, you can say "not me!" as much as you want. It does not change the fact that we, too, exist in the world that shaped Elliot Rodger. We have been bumped, bruised, and damaged by the conditions we live in - the societal expectations and the limitations, the diagnosis-medication-then-what? paradigm.
We want so ardently for Elliot Rodger's manifesto, his videos, and his Internet posts to disappear because it allows us to cement our belief that he is the other, that he was not one of us. We want to connect with the victims because it allows us to preserve our own feelings of innocence.
We can never be fully certain of anything, except that there is no single cause - we cannot point fingers because none of us have enough fingers to point if we want to cover every factor that contributed to this event. We do not want to believe that one lost friendship, a divorce, a chemical imbalance, could cause us to become monsters too.
We feel a need to create monsters in our narratives of tragedies because if someone is a monster, they are not like us - we can dismiss the idea that we, too, house monsters inside of us. But, we need to acknowledge those monsters because we need to honestly, humbly look at the things in the world around us that anger us, our misconceptions, our beliefs that could turn us into something cruel and ugly, because we are all capable of being, becoming, - doing cruel, ugly things.
The point of bringing this up is not to say, "It could have been caused by anything, so there's no point talking about it." It is not just Elliot Rodger's single combination of circumstances - a broken family, a fear of socializing, possible mental illness, exposure to extreme misogynist ideologies - that created a monster. We live in a world where any of us can be exposed to or afflicted with something that can make monsters out of us. We can't make him disappear just because we want to continue believing that we are cut from a different cloth.
This could have been caused by anything - and that is why we must talk about it.
You can gasp and point fingers in indignation, you can say "not me!" as much as you want. It does not change the fact that we, too, exist in the world that shaped Elliot Rodger. We have been bumped, bruised, and damaged by the conditions we live in - the societal expectations and the limitations, the diagnosis-medication-then-what? paradigm.
We want so ardently for Elliot Rodger's manifesto, his videos, and his Internet posts to disappear because it allows us to cement our belief that he is the other, that he was not one of us. We want to connect with the victims because it allows us to preserve our own feelings of innocence.
We can never be fully certain of anything, except that there is no single cause - we cannot point fingers because none of us have enough fingers to point if we want to cover every factor that contributed to this event. We do not want to believe that one lost friendship, a divorce, a chemical imbalance, could cause us to become monsters too.
We feel a need to create monsters in our narratives of tragedies because if someone is a monster, they are not like us - we can dismiss the idea that we, too, house monsters inside of us. But, we need to acknowledge those monsters because we need to honestly, humbly look at the things in the world around us that anger us, our misconceptions, our beliefs that could turn us into something cruel and ugly, because we are all capable of being, becoming, - doing cruel, ugly things.
The point of bringing this up is not to say, "It could have been caused by anything, so there's no point talking about it." It is not just Elliot Rodger's single combination of circumstances - a broken family, a fear of socializing, possible mental illness, exposure to extreme misogynist ideologies - that created a monster. We live in a world where any of us can be exposed to or afflicted with something that can make monsters out of us. We can't make him disappear just because we want to continue believing that we are cut from a different cloth.
This could have been caused by anything - and that is why we must talk about it.
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