Guest Author
Columnists are called to dissect and analyze tragedies, and last week’s horrible killing spree in California is no exception. We try to draw conclusions about why it happened, and how it might be prevented in the future.
More gun laws. Better education about women’s equality. More and better services for people in psychological crisis. More and better services for people on the autism spectrum.
But before we dive into the abstract, before we start talking policy, we need to realize that the angry young man who killed six innocent college students is not at all a stranger.
Elliot Rodger — through press stories, through accounts of the Internet video that I cannot bring myself to watch, through his words and actions — is eerily familiar to me.
I’ve seen his face in the resolute anger of young men. Here in North Florida, they sport Confederate flags on their T-shirts. If you live in the South, you have glimpsed the resentment of people who expect entitlement but do not get it.
He’s reflected, too, in the eyes of misogynists who look right past me, as if I were invisible, when I am standing with my business-suited husband. The killer’s words can be heard near circles of men, commenting about women’s bodies as if those bodies exist solely for their own viewing pleasure.
As a daughter of the South, I’m no stranger to gun-love, either, or the violent machismo (even among women) that goes with it.
Anyone with teenagers is a witness to the fear, anxiety, and uncertainty through which young people view their futures. The ground beneath them seems to be constantly shifting. In fact, it may not be long before some of it is literally under water. Do we have 10 years, 20 years? The world, especially for those on the cusp of adulthood, can be a very frightening place.
In Elliot Rodger I recognize the anger, the anxiety, the misogyny, the violence, the sense of entitlement, the propensity to blame, and the risk for mental illness. All of these things should be examined. But there is something else, still, that resonates deeper. And it breaks my heart.
It is the image of a little boy crying in the car on the way to his new school, afraid that his peers will torment him. It’s the vision of a child walking through a school cafeteria, pummeled by food thrown by the other kids. Pure panic stops him in his tracks, and paralyzes him — right in the middle of a school hallway. This, according to news accounts, was Elliot Rodger’s childhood.
Elliot’s mother, according to the New York Times, believed as early as 1999 that her son had an autism spectrum disorder. As her little boy grew up and grew away, as the Internet provided thousands of electronic human contacts but not one friend, she tried to get him the services he needed.
According to the Times, Elliot Rodger was 8 years old when he began to sense that he was different. So was our own child. Quite naturally, Elliot became very anxious about it, as our own child did. We’d known about our son’s diagnosis, Asperger’s Syndrome, since he was 4; when his anxiety emerged, we were somewhat prepared to educate him. Maybe having a head start helped.
Any parent of a child on the spectrum will tell you that uttering the “a” word for the first time, in relation to your own child, is not something that’s done lightly. Elliot’s mother, a nurse, not only uttered it, but swore to in an affidavit it during her divorce proceedings. Apparently, Elliot’s diagnosis was one of the things the couple argued over.
In a perfect world, an 8-year-old Elliot might have been taught to celebrate his differences. People on the spectrum share the same sort of brain “wiring” as famous computer geniuses, inventors, scientists, and artists, after all. Renowned Asperger’s syndrome expert Tony Attwood says that people who have the condition are different, not defective.
Many people with AS do connect with others who are like them; some get services to help them reach their potential — though not without a fight. All of them have more difficulty than non-autistic people when it comes to connecting socially to others. Experts tell us, though, that they’re no more likely to commit violent acts than anyone else.
People who have Asperger’s have feelings and needs just like the rest of us. Nearly every single human being on the planet knows what it feels like to be excluded, left out, misunderstood, or bullied. Take that feeling and magnify it by 10,000, then go spend hours alone, searching the Internet for comfort. Like Elliot Rodger did.
But for the grace of God, there go any of us. Ill-equipped to understand his difference, unable to decode the seemingly arbitrary world of social interactions, and rejected by his peers over and over again, a young mind, wired differently, succumbed to mental illness. The twisted sickness, in turn, succumbed to evil.
It is no slight to the innocent murder victims to mourn one more. It turns out that the killer was not a stranger after all.
Julie Delegal, a University of Florida graduate, is a contributor for Folio Weekly, Jacksonville’s alternative weekly, and writes for the family business, Delegal Law Offices. She lives in Jacksonville. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
