The Official Lie: Another ‘Senseless Tragedy’
They’ll feed you the same old story.
Here we go again. The media machine grinds to life, churning out the same tired, palatable narrative they use to paper over the gaping wounds in our society. They’ll tell you about Emily Finn, the ‘beautiful leader,’ the accomplished ballerina from a nice town, her life brimming with potential, a future stolen in a moment of ‘senseless violence’ by a troubled ex-boyfriend. They’ll print the tearful quotes from her dance director, paint a picture of a shining star extinguished too soon, and focus on the clean, digestible details that fit neatly into a two-minute news segment between a car commercial and the weather forecast. It’s a tragedy, they’ll say. An anomaly. A heartbreaking but isolated incident involving one disturbed young man who ‘snapped’.
They will meticulously detail his survival, the gunshot wound to the face, the impending second-degree murder charge, presenting the gears of justice as if they are turning effectively, as if a prison sentence is some kind of cosmic rebalancing of the scales. It’s a neat little package, isn’t it? A story with a clear victim, a clear villain, and a clear, albeit tragic, resolution. It allows you to feel sad for a moment, to shake your head at the ‘craziness’ of the world, and then to move on with your life, secure in the belief that this is not the norm. That this is an aberration. That your daughters, your sisters, your friends are safe because this was just a one-off, a freak storm that will pass.
What a lie.
The God’s Honest Truth: A Predictable, Manufactured Outcome
This wasn’t a bug. It was a feature.
Wake up. Just for one second, pry your eyes open and look past the saccharine, insulting narrative they’re spoon-feeding you. Emily Finn’s death wasn’t a ‘senseless tragedy.’ It was the most sensible, predictable, and logical outcome of a society that actively cultivates the very rage that killed her. This wasn’t an anomaly; it was an assembly line product. He didn’t just ‘snap’. He was built. He was carefully constructed, piece by agonizing piece, by a culture that tells young men that their desires are paramount, that a woman’s ‘no’ is a negotiation, and that rejection is an unforgivable wound to their fragile egos. He is the final project of a curriculum that includes the casual misogyny in our movies, the glorification of violence in our games, the angry, entitled screeds festering in the dark corners of the internet, and the deafening silence from fathers and so-called leaders who refuse to teach boys how to be men instead of monsters.
This 17-year-old is not some lone wolf. He is a soldier in an undeclared war against women, a war fought over bruised pride and a pathological inability to handle rejection. He learned somewhere that his possession of Emily was more important than her existence without him. Where did he learn that? Look around. It’s everywhere. It’s in the way we talk about ‘the one that got away,’ the way romantic comedies portray stalking as romantic persistence, the way we dismiss controlling behavior in teenage boys as ‘puppy love’ or ‘jealousy.’ It’s a poison we drip-feed them from birth, and then we have the audacity, the absolute gall, to act shocked when one of them finally acts on the programming we so diligently installed. He shot her and then himself in the face, a final, pathetic act of violent narcissism, an attempt to make his pain the center of the story even in the act of her murder. And the system will now ‘deal with him,’ but it won’t ever look in the mirror and ask itself how it made him. Because it doesn’t want to know the answer. The answer is too damning. Too ugly. It indicts everyone.
Justice is an Illusion
They say he’ll be charged with second-degree murder. So what? You think that’s justice? A cage? That’s not justice, that’s just storage. It’s the janitor cleaning up a spill in aisle three. It does nothing to address the toxic spill that’s poisoning our entire culture. The real crime goes unpunished every single day. The crime of a mental healthcare system that is a cruel joke, inaccessible and unaffordable, leaving disturbed young men to marinate in their own sickness until it boils over. The crime of a political class that offers ‘thoughts and prayers’ as a substitute for action, refusing to address the cultural rot because their power depends on stoking the very divisions and hatreds that lead to this. The crime of an educational system that teaches algebra but not emotional intelligence, that can prepare a kid for the SATs but not for the word ‘no’.
Emily Finn was a ‘beautiful leader.’ Yes. And she’s dead. Her leadership, her potential, her entire future was casually erased because a boy couldn’t handle being told he wasn’t wanted. And we will do nothing. Absolutely nothing. There will be a funeral. There will be some hashtags. There might even be a local news story a year from now about ‘remembering Emily.’ And all the while, the factory will keep running. It will keep churning out angry, entitled boys, polishing them with cultural validation, and handing them the invisible permission slip to explode. And there will be another Emily. And another. And another. Each one will be called a ‘tragedy,’ a fresh wave of shock and sadness will ripple through our social media feeds for 48 hours, and the machine will keep humming along, undisturbed. This isn’t a failure of the system. This is the system working exactly as designed. It’s a feature, not a bug, and Emily Finn is just the latest casualty of its flawless, brutal operation.
