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kwassa

(23,340 posts)
Sat Aug 19, 2017, 11:23 PM Aug 2017

James Fields Jr. was being treated for schizophrenia with medication ...

This post is not meant to justify a single thing he has done. I simply wonder how many of his compatriots in this nazi cause come from similarly damaged backgrounds.


according to the Washington Post.

It was during one such conversation that Fields described his mental instability, Weimer said: “He was pretty matter-of-fact. He just told me that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was getting help.”

To Weimer, the mention of a psychosis provided a possible explanation for Fields’s mysterious absence from school during part of his freshman and sophomore years at Cooper High, which has 1,200 students.Weimer tried to be encouraging with Fields about his condition.“My thought was, ‘My God, what a hammer blow in life,‘ “ he said. “My reaction was, as a teacher, I said: ‘Okay, let’s make this positive. So you have this challenge. And you may have to take meds. But this is something you can rise above. People can deal with this successfully.‘


this is besides the other tough afflictions his family faced:

If James was not already a disturbed child, he would soon become one. For Bloom, a single mother, the anger roiling in her son and his eventual outbursts of violence were just the latest in a litany of personal travails dating to her own youth.

When she was 16 and living with her mother, Judy Bloom, her father showed up one August night at the apartment mother and daughter shared, according to 1984 news accounts. After murdering Judy with a shotgun blast, Marvin Bloom fatally turned the 12-gauge on himself. Samantha was unharmed.

Her son never met his own father, James Alex Fields, who died in a traffic accident caused by a drunk driver five months before James Jr. was born on April 26, 1997.

As for Bloom, she is paralyzed below the waist from an injury in a different car crash. She was in a wheelchair when she purchased the Mistflower Lane condo for $120,000 - and a decade later, long after the housing bubble had burst, she would sell it at a 20 percent loss.


http://www.standard.net/National/2017/08/19/CHARLOTTESVILLE-FIELDS
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WhiskeyGrinder

(22,147 posts)
2. People who are hurting hurt other people.
Sat Aug 19, 2017, 11:27 PM
Aug 2017

It's important to understand how broken some of these people are and think about how we can prevent that damage in future generations, while still holding them accountable for their actions.

The Velveteen Ocelot

(115,280 posts)
4. I heard an interview with a guy from this organization: Life After Hate.
Sat Aug 19, 2017, 11:41 PM
Aug 2017
https://www.lifeafterhate.org/ It's a group of people who used to be members of hate groups, formed to help others get away from those groups and straighten out their lives. The person who was interviewed said all of the ex-members they work with have backgrounds of dysfunction - problems with abandonment, broken homes, drugs, mental illness, etc. That's not to excuse what these groups and these people do, but it does make sense that messed-up people do messed-up things. These hate groups offer damaged people a purpose and a "family." Interestingly, their on-line recruiting methods are much the same as those used by ISIS - they look for sad, damaged young men and offer them a cause to belong to - they are told they will be participating in the great cause of "saving their people."

Life After Hate had been awarded a $400,000 grant from the Department of Homeland Security under the Obama administration to help them reach out to hate group members to get them away from those groups and rebuild their lives. The Trump administration just canceled the grant. I wonder why?

Snake Plissken

(4,103 posts)
7. These are the kind of people Trump and his ilk prey upon
Sat Aug 19, 2017, 11:51 PM
Aug 2017

They won't life a finger to help them, but they're more than happy to fill their head with hatred and create imaginary enemies for them to hate.

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