Keller @ Large: Extreme Case Of Grievance Culture?

BOSTON (CBS) - What prompted the Virginia killer to take the lives of two broadcast journalists and then his own?

We'll find out for sure soon enough. But there already seems to be plenty of evidence that he was motivated by grievances against his former employer and the people who worked there, some of which are documented in a sad litany of memos from his personnel file that led up to his firing two years ago.

And it wouldn't surprise me at all if this winds up being an extreme case of the excesses of the grievance culture, my pet name for the dyspeptic, blame-ready, responsibility-shunning society we seem to have created.

We've seen it in the rise of fury-stoking media silos across the political spectrum, where conservatives get their daily feeding of outrage-inducing news from Fox and the Drudge Report, and liberals tune in to MSNBC and log onto the Daily Kos website for their angry-calorie intake.

And people on the front lines of public interaction – teachers, cops, store clerks, waiters and waitresses – have been testifying for years about the rise of citizen and customer entitlement and the decline of manners and self-restraint.

Everyone wants what they want the way they want it when they want it, which is usually yesterday.

When they don't get it, it's because of a conspiracy against them, discrimination, or other forms of evil in the hearts of those who aren't meeting their arbitrary needs.

You see it in our politics.

You see it in the workplace.

You see it in schools and on the streets.

And I suspect that on Wednesday, we saw it taking innocent lives.

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