I'm beginning to develop a theory about the next generation.
Not having to do with access to guns. That's a separate issue. But having to do with the way this generation (millennials and younger) are being raised, not only without God and faith and and a morality that transcends human wisdom (right/wrong, good/evil), but also being raised as if they're the center of the universe.
Maybe this next generation should be called the "narcissistic generation." YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, selfies. This is their world. Affirmation is not an option but a necessity. One of my students wrote in a paper this semester that if she doesn't get at least 50 "likes" on a Facebook post she removes the post.
Even if it turns out this guy Elliot Rodgers had some kind of mental disorder, it doesn't change my thinking. I believe he's an inevitable by-product of the societal trend that fosters self-affirmation. Social media not only perpetuates this trend, it probably spawned it.
From childhood, millennials have been nurtured on the idea that they're self-important, that everything has to go their way, that they are "winners," that nothing bad should ever happen to them, that they deserve happiness, that the world revolves around them. And when it finally dawns on them that the world does not revolve around them, those that that are already a bit "off" (like this guy apparently was) are already be primed to commit atrocities like this.
But not, of course, before they get out their I-phones and videotape themselves, up close, in our faces, talking about how they've been wronged.
Factor in the secularist, anti-Christian, anti-God thinking that now permeates both the schools and public square, and the inevitable result is pretty frightening. What we saw in Isla Vista last night is just a symptom of a greater ill: narcissism run amok.
Isla Vista Shooting Suspect Left Disturbing Manifesto (Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2014).
