Ethan Crumbley's mother wrote a letter to Trump in 2016.
After every mass shooting, there is the inevitable litany of trite explanations—individual psychology, access to guns, violent video games—that provide ready-made “solutions.” Nothing is ever learned, or examined, by the politicians or the pundits.
While there is much that is still unknown about the particular circumstances behind the shooting in Oxford, Michigan, what has come out reveals something of the social and political reality that forms its backdrop.
In 2016, Crumbley’s mother, Jennifer Crumbley, a realtor, wrote an open letter to incoming President Donald Trump, whom she voted for. In her confused and desperate letter, Crumbley describes her family’s economic existence, as part of the American lower middle class.
“I am 38 years old. I have a family. My husband and I both work full time jobs. I have watched our insurance premiums double. I cannot afford to buy into this Obamacare. For my family its over $600 a month with deductibles. We bust our ass Mr. Trump. I pay taxes, my husband pays his child support, I donate to charities. We are good f*ing Americans that cannot get ahead."
“My husband suffered a stroke and a broken back and we were with just my income. Do you know how hard it is to support a family on only $40,000 a year? I couldn’t qualify for State Aid. I made to much.”
She concluded, “I have high hopes you will shut down Big Pharma, make health care affordable for me and my MIDDLE CLASS family again,” she wrote.
The world Ms. Crumbley describes is a world of perpetual economic anxiety and desperation. But with this is mixed backwardness, cultural poverty and historical ignorance that Trump and his movement feeds on.
A child who commits such a crime at such a young age suffers from a deep psychological pathology but one that has been exacerbated by the sickness of society. Skyrocketing social inequality, the glorification of militarism, the promotion of xenophobia and, to top it all off, a pandemic that has killed 800,000 Americans. Is it a surprise that the society that regularly produces such mass shootings—more than any other country—has the highest death rate from COVID-19? In Michigan alone, 200 people are dying every day. In the United States, life is exceptionally cheap.
The growing mood of resistance in the working class, however, will bring with it a radical change in the political, intellectual and, indeed, moral climate of the country. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/12/03/pers-d03.html
