Mass Murder: A Small Person's Way to Immortality

If it is true as the American rock band The Presidents of the United States of America says that, "Everyone Wants to Be Naked and Famous" then what happens to those who will never be remembered? Will they sit back and allow themselves to disappear into the dusts of time?

There are a select few who will be remembered for all time. There are only so many Shakespeares, Edisons, and Socrateses with both the talent and the luck to have themselves embedded into the history of the world immemorial. In fact, those two characteristics seem to be the most important when considering who will eventually be added to the annals of the never to be forgotten. You must be great at what you do, and others have to know it as well. They have to write about you and those accolades must survive natural disasters, wars, general apathy and sometimes even a concerted effort to eliminate all memory of your achievements.

But what will you do if you have no talent? Or you do have talent but others don't recognize it. What if you have great potential but you are so far behind others in the advantages of life that you get held back by the masses? Perhaps its money, or lack of it, that stops you from entering M.I.T., Harvard, or Oxford? Maybe it's a lack of social graces whereby you are shunned by those with the influence to send you on your way. Finally, it could be psychological or physical trauma that derails your engine before it even leaves the station. It is a wonder that anyone achieves their full potential when so many obstacles are in the way.

But alas you do have options. Just ask Mark Lepine, Charles Manson or Martin Bryant. I will not detail their crimes as you no doubt already know or can easily find out without my help what they did. But the fact that you know their names is testament to their fame. Will these men be remembered like Jack the Ripper? No one can predict, but it seems they are written about (as this article attests) time and time again whenever the subject of murder is addressed. So if you are held back, shunned, or never given the opportunity to shine you can always enter a public arena with weapons of your choice and kill as many people as you can. The more you kill the better the chances you have to be written about long after you have taken your own life or have been arrested or killed by the police.

I wonder if that was the motivation of Lepine (Ecole Polytechnique Shooting), Pierre Lebrun (OC Transpo Shooting), Kimveer Gill (Dawson College Shooting), or most recently Cho Seung-Hui (mass murder at Virginia Tech). Other reasons are given: a hatred of women, revenge on insensitive coworkers, or perhaps a love of violence, but I wonder if deep down in their hearts they just wanted to be known, to have their existence noticed and perhaps be remembered by people however infamously both after their deaths and into the future.

Article by:
The Ignorant Intellectual

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