After the recent shooting in San Jose, California, where a deranged VTA employee executed several coworkers he targeted for extermination, I immediately had an inkling the shooting had something to do with a grievance within the workplace. All the signs were there, the fact that it took place at the fuel station where no customers really were, the fact that the perpetrator's house was set on fire, the fact that certain victims were spared while others were treated like animals for slaughter. All of this shows a kind of coldness for a particular hard work ethic we value so dearly in our society, a kind of lashing out against the elusive "establishment". It is so sad that this happened because I believe it could have been avoided, that is what a coworker of the shooter stated several days after the incident; he said that the shooter was not that bad a person and that he was often made fun of at work. Workplace bullying is a real problem, though it certainly does not justify violent acts like mass shootings. We have to remember how much stress everyone is currently under, that they are on the brink of insanity working at these very dangerous jobs during a deadly pandemic. Any of us could snap under such conditions. Yet people refuse to admit to their vulnerability; they say, "no, that would never be me". Do you really believe that? How could you even know what you would do under a situation you have never been in before? No matter how much you talk, you do not know what you would do until you are faced with the situation. If we are going to teach equality, if we are going to pretend to be such a kindly society based on empathy, and then fail to live up to that promise, we will suffer the consequences. Now, obviously we are taught that the proper thing to do is suffer. We are taught that fighting against authority figures is downright evil while the very same authority figures flout the laws they make. We are taught not to be frustrated with this. We are taught to ignore the very real problems with this false empathy that is becoming more and more popular. We are instructed, by people who do not care about us, to feel better, to look better, to do better. It is always a problem with the individual; the society is never held accountable. The authority figures are held even less accountable. It is easy to blame guns; it is easy to say that, had we taken the shooter's guns, then this would never have happened. I am not entirely convinced that is true. Just think of all the people with guns in this nation. Do you really think all of these people have the potential to become mass shooters? There are too many people with guns for that to even be possible. During difficult times we search for the easy answers. This provides us with comfort, but it is only temporary. This will happen again and again and again, but not because of guns. It will happen because humans are selfish. They believe that they are not responsible for others. They believe that they can walk all over the average person, using them as a stepping stool to get to the top. I have explained to you that this system is cutthroat. It minimizes human beings to human capital, another asset for the fat cats to exploit. Revenge killings abound in such an environment. We saw something similar during the anarchy movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Now we are seeing it in a form that we are not so familiar with. Anarchism is easy to neutralize when it is organized, but this is not what we are seeing. There are no traditional politics behind these mass shootings. People are not using the legal system to make change; they are taking it into their own hands in a last ditch effort to be recognized...for anything. If you have not been to edge of sanity and back, you will not understand a lot of what I have to say in this episode, but it needs to be said regardless. I have been silent about the painfully obvious cause of workplace shootings for too long.