PITTSBURGH — Before opening fire on an aerobics class, George Sodini wrote about feeling lonely and rejected – yet those very characteristics put him in the company of other mass killers whose isolation helped create a murderous cocktail.
Loneliness is dangerous.The One Year Monk writes here with sensitivity for guys like Georeg Sodini. Another HuffPost blogger, Logan Nakyanzani Pollard, wrote a follow up piece in which she said she's tired of the sob-stories of guys like Sodini. Her rage is certainly justified. Sodini, like all rapists, is a terrorist. I just don't know how she thinks this lack of compassion will protect women?
There are more Sodinis brewing out there. Some of them are going to snap. Most of them won't. Most of them will live angry, sad lives and die lonely and no one will care. They will feel forever cut off from women as this biological imperative aches within them, subverting reason, giving them tunnel vision.
Also from the post above:Many mass murderers feel rejected by a "pseudo community" that may exist only in their minds, said Dr. James Knoll, a forensic psychiatrist at the State University of New York's Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. ...
"He probably worked out at this gym, he was tanning and working out, trying to improve himself," Knoll said of Sodini. "These are things he thought would get him a relationship. It wasn't working."
And it's not going to work. So what do we do for people whose heartache becomes a danger to the public? It's an anguish that I'm relatively sure that a woman as attractive as Pollard cannot comprehend. The One Year Monk has never felt the degree of detachment and loneliness of a Sodini, but he's got a compassion for them. I can see why they feel so desperate.
The truth is that we live in a world in which we see people coupling up happily all around us. There's this very sad minority who can't make it happen. The message they receive from the media is that there is someone out there for them. For some folks, that just isn't true. No one wants them. They send up red flags. They don't have that hot quality. Not a whiff of it. The longer they go without, the more anxious they feel. Who's looking out for the very lonely?
Some of them snap and do terrible things. They should be punished, but I can't help but think that finding the very lonely, the desperate, listening to their sob stories and offering them an alternative (not hope that they will find someone, but an alternative) would help prevent violence. I suppose it's fine to hate the killers, but what about loving the lost before they kill?
If you feel lost alone, please yet the One Year Monk know. This site is for you.
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