National Post (National Edition)
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE DRIVER
‘We’ve all felt the sting of rejection. I regularly look in the mirror disappointed with what I see. But we don’t kill people or advocate rape or mass attacks because of those feelings. What we do instead is man up.’
Alek, I’m not going to lie. You scared the hell out of me.
I don’t spook easily, but you killed someone at every intersection I use to take my daughter to and from nursery school. You killed someone in front of the drugstore I shop at. In front of my bank. My gym. The library I use. The store where we buy groceries. You killed someone across from the ice cream joint my daughter loves. They make sundaes that look like Muppets.
My daughter and I just missed you the other day — or more accurately, you just missed us. We crossed the street about an hour before you got there. We got away but you ran down one of our neighbours, Betty Forsyth. She was 94 years old, tough guy. She used a walker.
I ran to the scene shortly after you were arrested. There was a security guard, a middle-aged man, standing by a stretch of police tape, telling someone how he saw it happen. How he actually saw someone die right in front of him, right before his eyes. He kept repeating it like that — like it was too large a fact to swallow whole.
Further down the street, an EMR van opened up and an elderly woman got out, helped gently to the pavement by a paramedic. She was fine, apparently — physically. But she stood there for several minutes, blinking hard under April’s perfect sky. There were shoes and backpacks in the street. Police tape everywhere. Ambulances. Fire trucks. Cops yelling at people to get away from a crime scene. And those godawful orange blankets.
That street never stops. It is never empty. It’s coursing at every hour, in all weather, with cars and people, sounds and light and smells. You can get red-bean waffles at the Korean food stand at one o’clock in the morning on a Tuesday if you want, Alek. It’s a neverending stream of humanity. But you did it. You stopped that stream. You turned the first truly beautiful day of the year into something unspeakably ugly.
But I’m still not sure you made any sort of point, hit your mark, so to speak.
Everyone is speculating, of course. Naturally, they want to know why you did it, what was going on in that head of yours.
I’m curious too. I want to know what’s going through your head right now, as you sit in custody. Are you satisfied with yourself? Are you horrified at what you did? Is that why you cried out for Constable Lam to shoot you in the head? Were you afraid of what you had become?
Or were you looking for martyrdom?
That’s how it’s playing out among that army of venomous basement creatures you seemed to have aligned yourself with. They see you as a martyr for their cause, a fresh P.O.W. in their war against … against, who exactly, Alek? Grandmas? Hard-working kitchen hands? Single mothers? People who enjoy sunny spring days and use their lunch hour to run errands?
I’ve studied violent men for the past five years. I’ve written about serial rapists, serial killers; men who kill people in the name of some sacred cause. Here’s what they all have in common: they all have a reason, Alek. A philosophy. Some righteous justification that makes perfect sense to them, that assured them they were entitled to do whatever it is they did. And what they all failed to understand, at least at the time of their crimes, is that that justification is never anything more than a mirage. It is a heat-shimmer that exists only in their heads, the product of their unexamined and untamed emotions. Some of them never come to this realization. They create a labyrinth in their mind and spend the rest of their days running from the Minotaur of their conscience. Those who do eventually realize this still invariably need to have their distorted thinking hammered out of them over and over again.
Presumably you have some time now. So allow me to take the first swing.
However you might think this grand and grotesque gesture of yours is playing out in the world beyond your holding cell, here’s what we all plainly witnessed: A childish tantrum.
A terrible and lethal one, yes. But, essentially, you went on the kind of rampage a toddler goes on when he doesn’t get what he wants. Which is why you — and the entire incel squadron — will never advance your so-called cause: because there is no cause to advance.
To be fair, Alek — not that it’s especially easy for me to think about fairness at this exact moment, not as I sit here in the Starbucks outside which you mowed down several pedestrians — but to be fair, it’s not yet clear how much you actually buy into the incel worldview; whether you’re a committed believer or whether it was a just a passing idea that appealed to a long-unbalanced mind.
What’s clearer, it seems, is that boyhood wasn’t especially easy or full of grace for you. You were awkward and timorous, apparently. At one point, before all this, you were probably deserving of some sympathy and understanding.
But that ship has sailed, Alek. No sympathy now. Some advice though — if not for you, then for the legion of indignant man-children pondering their next violent move. Here’s what you have all failed to understand about yourselves: There is a reason you’re not getting anywhere with the ladies — or getting your way, whatever that is. You are deeply, deeply unattractive. But not because you don’t look like the Rock or Chris Hemsworth or whatever Chad makes the needle of your jealousy twitch and tremble.
We all feel awkward and unattractive. We’ve all felt the sting of rejection. I regularly look in the mirror disappointed with what I see. But we don’t kill people or advocate rape or mass attacks because of those feelings.
What we do instead is man up. And I don’t mean shooting steroids and shotgunning beers. I mean we act like adults. We examine ourselves and take ownership of those things that are not particularly show-off worthy: we compensate by putting ourselves in uncomfortable situations precisely so we can master what previously intimidated us.
More specifically, let me give you some lessons from my own experience. Because, like you, I’ve ached for an excuse to use violence — though, I have to point out, a very different form of violence than yours. My own personal penchant was looking for reasons to beat up men who I felt were being aggressive or threatening to people who couldn’t defend themselves. (Men like you, actually, Alek. I have to admit you and your 4Chan chums have brought that particular itch to the surface again. I’ve had to work pretty hard at keeping it tamped down enough to think straight.) Anyway, I too had my own heatshimmer justifying this urge of mine. I saw myself as The Equalizer, occasionally cleaning the street of scum.
But that’s not who I was, Alek. In reality I was The Agravator. I wasn’t stopping aggressive or threatening men, I was actively provoking them, looking for an excuse to mix it up because it was thrilling. I was making the world around me more dangerous than it needed to be. Simply because it made me feel more like a man.
It took me a long, hard look inward to see that that desire to feel like a man — or rather that particular kind of man — was underwritten by a deep sense of vulnerability and inadequacy.
I’ve found this to be true of every seriously violent man I interviewed. Tough guys, fighters, rapists, killers. Guys often express a whole variety of disparate emotions as anger — sadness, despair, self-loathing, loneliness — without realizing that’s what they’re doing. We have a tendency to pile all of our emotions into one overloaded basket. Maybe it’s because it feels better — more empowering, more in control — to be pissed off at something than to be sad and lonely.
Over time, that overloaded basket begins to take a toll on the mind that has to lug it around. It twists the optics of our perception so that we see ourselves as victims, which allows the fear to well up in us further — and the anger masking the fear along with it. It becomes a negative feedback loop fuelling that sense of justification I mentioned earlier.
The other problem — a considerable one — is that for all our ability to be analytical, thoughtful and humane, we are still animals. If there is one dependable way of eliciting violence in an animal, even the most timorous of creatures, it is to scare them, make them feel threatened for prolonged periods. Corner even the lowly mouse and it will eventually lash out.
But we’re men, Alek, not mice. And so we have a choice to make.
That choice is to ignore the fear and inadequacy. To deny it. To allow it to curdle our minds and embitter us and allow us to convince ourselves we are the victims. And in doing so, allow it to control us.
Or we take that long hard look inward and control it.
It isn’t easy. It takes real strength, a toughness you clearly lack.
But that’s what actual manhood looks like, Alek — like growing up.
Which is why I stand by what I said earlier: despite all the targeted death and destruction, you missed the mark entirely.