(March 15, 2019 at 3:14 pm)Gae Bolga Wrote: I wasn't trying to steal anybody's hut or their rack of ribs, man, lol.
I'll just suggest, again, that people like this think that they -are- serving in combat. It sounds weird, and that, in and of itself, may be nutball shit...but what they do on the back of that can be as lucid as anything that you or I have ever done. It can be the only sane response to a cracked reality. Honestly, that's what keeps people shooting in warzones, too.
If you want to directly address these incidents, mental health and economics and all that, while laudible, isn't really the way to go. You have to engage with the rhetoric that produced the mindset. A sane person can and will do things like this if they buy in. I'm telling you that from experience. You can look into anyone's past and find economic and relationship failures.
They may see themselves as a hero, but what I am saying is that is just them most of the time ignoring or covering up their own failures. White nationalists and those who join Isis, are not the same guys who landed on the beaches of Normandy.
I can say about myself when I was a teen and a young adult, I got angry at the world. And the truth is even after I got rid of my rage, I still never had anything but minimum wage jobs my entire life. There would have been a time if the wrong person, had sold me on a "movement" I also could have seen myself as being in "combat". So today, while I didn't go up the economic ladder, and while I never had any long term relationship with women, I know now that I don't have to look myself as a failure just because I didn't meet other's metrics, nor do I feel the need to belong to something now.
I feel lucky I didn't get suckered into the wrong group. I also feel lucky that I know now that being single isn't the worst thing in the world. I also feel lucky that losing a job also isn't the worst thing in the world.
But I do know how desperate I was back then in wanting to fit in and belong.
