Vester Lee Flanagan, the failed broadcaster who sneaked up on two of his former colleagues and murdered them on live TV, bore a load of self-righteous rage.
“Yes, it will sound like I am angry … I am,” he wrote in his suicidal statement issued to ABC News. “And I have every right to be.”
Of course he did. The events that brought him to his murderous state were not his fault. Other people, he said, drove him to it — racists, homophobes, bullies, white women, even black men.
He was a victim. The nation is full of people just itching to be offended and then revelling in how they have been wronged. It’s an ever-growing cult of victimization. Some wear their Constitutional right to resentment like an open sore, picking at it until the bitterness pervades all they encounter. A few, like Flanagan, nurture and twist it until it metastasizes into something diabolical.
It shouldn’t have been this way. Flanagan, whose on-air name was Bryce Williams, was a handsome guy, and according to former co-workers, a pretty good on-air broadcaster and reporter. That he was black should have helped because TV stations are forever looking to mute charges they are not diverse.
But his personality made it so that he couldn’t keep a job. Twice he was fired from TV gigs for being weird, hard to work with, even scary.
Flanagan apparently didn’t explore inward to determine the cause of his failures. Why should he? It was someone else’s fault. It was racism.
He filed a complaint against his most recent employer, the Virginia station, for “racist” comments, including the time one colleague noted that a reporter “was out in the field.” Most took that statement to mean that the reporter was on the scene, covering news; he saw his slave ancestors picking cotton. And there was the time someone brought watermelon to work. The co-worker, in Flanagan’s mind, might has well carried in a noose.
“He was sort of looking out for people to say things that he could take offense to,” his former boss, WDBJ general manager Jeffrey A. Marks, told the New York Times.
More than a decade earlier, Flanagan filed a lawsuit against the Tallahassee station that ran him off, making similar allegations.
It’s not hard to find material on the Internet to feed one’s sense of being wronged. Each day, Twitter or Facebook or some other site carries images to fuel indignation. There’s a cop being rude or cruel to a black motorist; there’s someone who said the N-word; there are even black ladies in a book club being booted from the wine train in California for laughing too loud.
Take your pick, there’s forever a new outrage. Just click and get ready to seethe.
Flanagan said his “tipping point” was the slaughter of nine black churchgoers last June by a white gunman in Charleston. He said he bought a gun two days after that.
“As for Dylann Roof? You (deleted)! You want a race war (deleted)? BRING IT THEN YOU WHITE (deleted)!!!” he stated in his suicide letter. (I refuse to refer to it as a manifesto, as some sources called it. Karl Marx published a manifesto. Vester Flanagan typed a whiny diatribe.)
Of course, the Charleston gunman was a self-described victim worried that his country was being taken away from him. "You rape our women and you're taking over our country, and you have to go," he said as he reloaded and killed church-going black people in their house of worship.
When everyone’s endangered, everyone’s in danger
You see, it’s not only black folk looking for outrage, seeking that satisfying sense of victimhood and all the power of righteous indignation that it wields. White people are getting pretty darn good at it, too.
America is an equal opportunity offender, with victims lining up on either side of whatever divide you got. A black guy gets shot in Ferguson, Mo., and soon both he and the cop are victims. And there are media echo chambers built for either side, ready to shout down any whisper of opposition or voice of reason.
A study from Tufts University in 2011 found that white respondents saw anti-white bias as more prevalent that anti-black bias. It’s seen as a zero-sum game, any gain for blacks is necessarily torn from the clutches of whites.
All the time, I get emails and calls from supporters of the Confederate flag, which is in retreat like it’s the spring of 1865 again. The flag wavers grumble about how their beliefs are the only ones people can openly ridicule. And I forever hear that straight white Christian males are an endangered species. I must add that I fit all three of those but don’t yet feel like a dodo bird.
‘Don’t worry, we’ll take our country back’
I’ve also heard otherwise perfectly sane and middle class white guys — some of whom I’m friends with — refer to Obama as Hitler. Portraying the nation’s first black president as a goose-stepping megalomaniac bent on world domination (rather than a politician with bad ideas) makes those who oppose him seem like victims. Hey, Hitler put people in ovens, God only knows what Obama might do.
Donald Trump has made a sport of white victimization, filling football stadiums. “Don’t worry, we’ll take our country back,” he said at a rally last month. He no doubt meant wresting it from the clutches of Muslim Hitler.
Back in the early 1990s, an author named Charles Sykes penned a best-seller called “A Nation of Victims” that warned about the impact of the headlong rush to be offended.
“There are real victims and people who have suffered genuine misery,” he said. “The problem is they tend to get lost in the shuffle.”
