Word: whitmans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...difficult to understand why there are so many disturbed people like Charles Whitman [Aug. 12] in your technological society...
Because Charles Whitman was male, the major motivation behind his psychosis is said to have involved his mother. Yet it wasn't his mother who trained him to handle guns as soon as he was old enough to hold them; it wasn't his mother who beat his father; it wasn't his mother who is described as authoritarian; it wasn't his mother he hated with passion...
...fact that Charles Whitman [Aug. 12] was psychotic and is now dead is unimportant to the unaccountable, unbalanced, whacked-up bunch of people who will strive to perpetrate any crime for the sake of the publicity, as you well know. How can you elevate such a person to that extent? Charles Whitman may be "news"-but isn't there someone in this country who deserved enough commendation last week to have appeared on your cover? You could always resort to a picture of Niagara Falls...
...Whitman told his psychiatrist he had a desire to shoot people from high places. That nothing was done in the light of this threat I consider to be a gross moral, if not professional, lapse on the part of the psychiatrist. It is criminal that this boy could have seen a psychiatrist and not have had basic tests done, such as an encephalogram, which could have spotted the cause of his suffering and led to control of his antisocial behavior...
...these times of euphemism-of a softening of language as soft as the brains of those who are softening it-let us not forget that Whitman was a bully, a pervert and a coward. He was a pervert in that he enjoyed murdering more than not murdering. He was a coward in that he fled his problems through death-and had not the courage to take his own life, but forced the responsibility on another...