( As mass killings and suicides increase in our society we are made to look more and more closely all the time at our culture to determine why. As a person who came from and survived an intensely dysfunctional family I have been looking at it and thinking about it for a very long time. )
Part One: My Own "Adam's Family" Experience
I come from a family that once was a good bit like the Adam Lanza family. We had a lot of death and violence and psychosis. In fact it was a lot worse in a way. Mom graduated at the top of her class. Dad did not do all that well at Case Western Reserve University. He was a self-taught chemist and did not need college. He read Scientific American all his life. He would tell us about Einstein's theory of relativity at the supper table with the bad food he provided. He is the inventor of the Halogen light bulb. He and the rest of us are book smart and life stupid. One could say we are all autistic savants. But maybe the term "aspergers" is more correct. He and Mom were the most awful parents. They are both dead now so I can talk about them.
I see the same sort of thing everywhere in this western world and my family was an extreme version of what white-is-right society is doing all over the world with its aggressive war machines. Or is it simply that my family acted the whole thing out within the family group instead of in the greater society?
At age twenty my brother Tom used a vacuum cleaner hose and a car and drove into the woods and killed himself. Mom had abused him so badly that he had no chance for a life. His suicide was a relief. It was inevitable. He was an intensely broken person. His misery was intense and he acted out and was hell to his younger brother. He was violent and horrible and could not possibly learn to grow up and become an adult. He was psychologically smashed. I was happy for him when I found out that he had killed himself.
A few years later Steven killed himself with a gun. He was not as psychotic or as violent or as broken as Tom but his suicide was also inevitable.
Peg told me before she died that when she was young she would get up on a winter morning and huddle near the heat registers when they first went on and cry. She was intensely cold. Mom and Dad used electric blankets and when they did not work anymore they gave them to us, the kids. We got two blankets which were grossly insufficient in a house that had almost no heat in the winter in Cleveland Ohio. Dad turned the heat way down at night.
When Mom was pregnant with Peg she punched her own belly violently and lost it. Peg was her seventh child and she had had enough of parenting long before Peg arrived. She then got pregnant one more time with Steve after Peg was born. But of course if you are a Catholic you do not practice birth control. You will go to "hell forever" if you do. See my article on opednews.com click here
Dad invented good stuff but GE kept the money basically. Do you know what that did to him? He used to experiment in his father's basement with chemicals when he was a kid. He had dedicated all his life to being an inventor. Little good it did him. He got paid $30,000 a year for being a top notch inventor. The corporation owns the patent.
Peg's back did the Hunchback of Notre Dame thing when she hit puberty's growth spurt. She had a rod put in her back which almost killer her. She had a compromised immune system all her life which she got partly because of that iron rod she figures. She worked in a corporation that used ammonia in its copy machine. The room she worked in was not far from the copy machine. That was the needle that broke the camel's back. Soon afterward she came down with chronic fatigue syndrome. She battled on for years but one could see her suicide coming a long way off. One of the siblings instructed her on how to use a helium tank to off herself. She did not want to become a vegetable. Her quality of life was near zero when she finally killed herself. There was nothing to be done at that point. I was sad to lose her as I loved her a lot but I was glad she was out of that ruined body.
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