Lord only knows why it took until now for your post on litigation from January to come up in my aggregator, but I read it and was extremely impressed by its clarity. I rarely see this kind of material presented in this way!
I think you’re exactly right — there will be more, many more, situations where frustrated men at the end of their rope attempt or actually commit public suicide.
The first thing I thought about when I heard the news of the train wreck was that the guy was most likely a divorced dad. I’ve been an advocate and supporter of men’s issues since 1999, and the stories, when you hear them, are almost identical.
A few years back, there was a situation here in Arizona where a man shot several people, including his ex-wife and himself. Shortly thereafter, the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson published the full text of a letter he’d posted shortly before the incident, and it read like any of dozens of e-malis I’d had from frustrated divorced men in the same boat. So while the media was wringing its public hands wondering why such a thing could happen, I knew exactly why. I sent a letter to the Editor of the AZ Star providing a detailed explanation, and they never printed it.
In those days nobody wanted to hear that kind of thing. Men are pigs, period. End of discussion.
Around the same time I had a fairly public go-round with the Regent of Stanford University, who felt it was just fine and dandy that one of the professors at his school would use her title and position to promote hate, (she was blaming all men for all of the domestic violence extant in the SF Chronicle) and felt entirely comfortable calling me an uneducated idiot for suggesting the woman’s actions were inappropriate. Had it been any other subject, she would have been immediately fired, since it was an inappropriate act.
Fortunately for all of us, things have begun to change. It’s slow, but they are changing. Blogs like yours are making a difference.
Oddly enough, even though the mainstream media has ignored and/or vilified me in the past, when I’ve been talking to people in my community, or even on my discussion groups, I’ve always found that there is a tremendous number of people — men and women both — who are disgusted and angry with a legal system that just seems like something out of Alice in Wonderland. So blogs are giving those people the chance to speak out. I’m encouraged by this, and can begin to hope that my (as of this moment), unmarried 26-year-old son may not have to go through what so many others have gone through in the past ten or twenty years.
Keep up the good fight! -TW
My response
Thank you, and just to say that it’s messages like this that keeps me going.
TW’s note refers to my comments at the end of “The Plight of the Pro se” topic on the left.