Written by Bob Maschi   

What do we blame for the Isla Vista massacre where a seriously sick young man massacred six people and wounded over a dozen more before committing suicide?

Some people want to blame guns. (Maybe)

Feminists want to blame misogyny. (Big part of it)

Many want to keep it simple and blame Asperger Syndrome. (I seriously doubt it)

Psychiatrists want to blame bad parenting. (Part of it)

Some call it a racist act, as the perpetrator railed against blacks, whites and Asians. (Possibly)

And for each explanation, there is a chorus out there claiming that the explanation is wrong.

Nowhere have I seen what I think was the major problem with this punk—the destructive, entitlement mentality of the wealthy. Elliot Rodgers was born to a well-off family. By the time he was four, he’d travelled more than most of us could ever hope to afford in our lifetimes. He wore sunglasses that were more expensive than the average working-family’s monthly grocery bill. He drove a BMW that his mother had given him as a gift. His parents paid for professional ‘friends’ for him to hang out with.

Reading the 140-page autobiography he left behind is like reading the whining of an overtired pre-schooler who didn’t get a pony for Christmas. He never took responsibility for any of his actions or problems. Everyone else was to blame—anonymous blonde women were his favorite scapegoats. He dreamed of becoming world emperor and enslaving all (yes, all) women in concentration camps so he could watch them slowly starve to death.

One particularly revealing quote from his ‘manifesto’ regarded an ‘ugly black man’ who was able to (presumably) bed attractive white women: “I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves. I deserve it more.”

That quote is a pretty good example of an entitlement mentality.

I don’t mean to sound callous to the grieving but there is a much larger issue at stake here—even larger than the deaths of the innocent, the sorrow of their families and the painful recovery of the wounded. An issue that will conveniently be unheard by most. Rodger’s murderous temper tantrum is a small example of what the wealthy, in their insatiable quest for obscene profits, are doing to our entire planet.

Most of the rich are mainly concerned with amassing as much wealth as possible in as short a time period as possible. They do not care about the dangers of war, the pollution of our drinking water, the death of bee populations, the killing off of our oceans, dangers of nuclear power, deforestation, growing poverty and starvation, the poisoning of our food supply and on and on.

I didn’t yet mention climate change. Which the wealthy and their corporations seem to want to handle by doing… more of what we did to get into this mess in the first place. And maybe none of these, alone, will be the end of us. But combined…

The wealthy care little about human, or any other, life when compared to their bank accounts. To them, most of us are simply trespassers on this planet, too cheap or too broke to pay the rent they are entitled to. They are currently practicing genocide on a global scale and leading this once beautiful world toward another mass extinction.

And some people wonder how the children of the rich can be both homicidal and suicidal. They are simply mimicking their parents.