Gunman Not Alone in His Frustration
The single rifle shot that killed Michael Generakos in the gathering darkness six days ago echoed in my head long after the moment passed.
It echoed because I feel as though I talk to people like him all the time.
If you dispute that point on the grounds that people hardly ever go the extremes Generakos did, I couldn’t argue. Most people don’t go to an office building, take a hostage at gunpoint and then step outside where they can be gunned down by a police
sharpshooter.
But the things that drove Generakos to do all that last week--the frustration, the anger, the ultimate despair that things won’t get better--
form an all-too-common part of my dialogue with readers.
I concede the danger in making too symbolic a figure of someone like Generakos, whose final desperate act surely wasn’t the norm. But there’s another danger in brushing him aside as nothing more than a man who went off the deep end.
On the morning after Generakos died, several messages awaited me. “I feel very sad for all the parties involved,” a woman said. “However, being the parent of a child with special needs, I understand the frustration this person might have felt, because I’ve been there myself.”
Another caller, also with a child with special-education needs, invited me to talk to him about problems he was having with a local school district.
That same morning, on an unrelated subject, a letter writer began this way: “I am writing to you because I believe you are a champion of justice.”
I don’t recite that for self-promotion, but to suggest that on any given day someone feels he or she is being run over by the system. Not uncommonly, they discuss their dispute in terms like “the struggle” or “the cause” or include the phrase, “I don’t know where else to turn.”
I remember a middle-aged man who wrote me several times over a period of months about a personnel problem he was having with the U.S. Post Office. He was convinced he’d been fired unfairly. We met and he talked in the most plaintive terms of how he was being wronged. And after I decided not to write about his problem, I privately feared that he was so distraught he might do something he’d regret.
The examples I’ve cited don’t even include the river of divorce and child-custody laments that drop into my lap on a weekly basis. I write about very few of them, but they’re characterized by a common theme: The people are angry and frustrated because they think the bureaucracy isn’t listening.
Maybe these people who seem at wits’ end write to a newspaper because they know it will listen to them with an objective ear. But in most cases, I probably come across like the bureaucrats they so much want to denounce.
In some cases, that’s because their beef is just too complicated to write about in a short space. In other cases, I simply decide their dispute is not resolvable.
When I tell them those things, I’m often torn. Torn because part of me wants to help them or, at least, explore their problem; another part, however, tells me it will take me into a quagmire. Often, I tell them I just can’t help them and there’s no point in calling me back.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t worry about them after I hang up. I hear the raging river of anger in their voice or, equally troubling, the resignation. I tell them I can’t help and then wonder how many times they’ve heard that before.
Luckily, and for reasons that must have to do with the resilience and restraint in the human spirit, only a small percentage of these people do something drastic. Somehow, their anger plays itself out and their stories never hit the newspapers.
But when someone like Michael Generakos does make the papers, and he winds up dead on the pavement with a bullet in the head, it echoes.
I can’t even pretend that I’m shocked to hear about it.
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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to [email protected]
