Norway's pain

It is almost impossible to grasp the shock the Norwegians are feeling today.  A country with a tiny population of less than five million people just lost at least 80 of its precious children.  They were participating in a summer camp organized by the Labor Party on an island near Oslo that had been purchased (in the 1950s when Norway was struggling to recover from the trauma of WW II) for the purpose of enriching the lives of Norway's poor.  In these days of ultra-rich Norway, it is sometimes easy to forget that for most of its history, MOST of its citizens were mired in grinding, subsistence-level poverty.  There has been so much poverty in Norway over the years that poverty has been the norm and it is the rich who are looked upon with great suspicion.  And so the Labor Party organized these facilities so that even poor children could have a summer-camp experience and THIS is where the massacre took place.

And if the accounts are to be believed, the gunman wasn't sharing in much of Norway's new-found prosperity.  He was 32 years old and still living with his mother.  He had tried to make a living farming--the last attempt at getting an income stream a poor Scandinavian will try--and failed at that.  And so he lashed out at a Labor Party that once would have been concerned about his needs but has, like most former leftist parties in Europe, become infatuated instead with the nasty combination of right-wing neoliberal economics and political correctness.

In the days ahead, we will probably read a lot about how a lone misfit with a bunch of psychological problems became a mass murderer.  What we probably won't read much about is how neoliberalism creates so many "losers" that even in arguably the most prosperous country on earth, a serious young man cannot figure out a way to have a normal life and steams away in anger until he explodes in madness.

So to all my grieving Norskie friends--I am sorry for your loss.  It must be so very painful.

update:

I DID find this comment at The Local.  So there ARE folks--at least in Scandinavia, who seem to understand some of the issues involved here.

Does this man look like a neo-nazi or a skinhead to you people? No, he is a more dangerous and deadly kind. The kind that knows how to think and where to hurt. The kind that never bluff and never walk around and do anything stupid. The kind that been ignored, ridiculed and marginalized by the liberal media and the liberal ruling elites around Europe. It is time now for the European Governments to pay attention to how their people feel, pay attention to their people's grievances, and put an end to this madness, otherwise, this kind of tragedy will not end here. This is the wake up call for all people of Europe, a new dawn of Europe, because this man is an evil to many of us, but today he is an hero to some, and that is a scary thought!