Read Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond for Free Online Page A

some point in their lives), he was on medications, he’d been through two failed marriages, and one of his sons had been busted for exposing himself. This characterization allowed people to safely frame the murder rampage as a freak occurrence committed by a freak.
     
    But the truth is that Wesbecker was a very common type, or at least he was seen as such before the murders. Think about any office you’ve worked at or the school you went to. Every workplace, school, or grouping of humans not brought together through friendship includes a percentage that the majority consider to be weird, not normal, strange, or even psycho. There’s always someone who seems “like the type who would snap,” although in case after case, it’s never the type who would snap who actually snaps. It’s the type who “no one could imagine he would ever do such a thing” who explodes in rage murder. Everyone’s family has at least a few “freaks” or “weirdos” who make their appearance at holiday functions. As a policeman at the Standard Gravure crime scene said, he spoke with employees who “named three or four other workers before Wesbecker who they thought might have been capable of doing that.” Even Wesbecker’s mental illnesses, his complexes and quirks, and his dysfunctional family are not at all uncommon in America, as is evidenced by the number of antidepressant prescriptions, the popularity of self-help books and depression-battle memoirs, or the numerous dysfunctional family memoirs, sitcoms, movies, and so on. Few are honest about this once the credits roll, but everyone knows how utterly ordinary these dysfunctions are.
    As an example of Wesbecker’s ordinariness, Mattingly observed, “Joe Wesbecker had a wonderful sense of humor, and he would come into my office oftentimes agitated or even angry, but invariably before he left he would be laughing or he would have me laughing.”
     
    This is one of the most painful revelations in the testimony. A “cheerful attitude” and laughing are tactics employed by all Americans, at an unconscious, even genetic level. Though many Americans privately know that one’s own smile is an attempt to put the other party at ease rather than a reflection of one’s own inner happiness, publicly, this is rarely admitted. Thus few of us know how many other Americans also force this desperate smile—we all think we’re the only ones faking it. These smiles are more like mammal calls used to identify the individual with the herd, to keep from being expelled. These calls that have to be repeated and repeated: you can’t just recite the backslapping platitudes once and you’re off the hook— as mammals, the office herd requires you to send out the correct marking signals every single day, every hour. It can be exhausting and humiliating. Yet the consequences of not constantly reminding everyone how normal you are range from getting placed on the slow-track to being first on the plank when the next downsizing diktat arrives from headquarters. In my own experience, this cheerfulness, this desperate smile, is one of the most corrosive features to daily life in America, one of the great alienators—a key toxic ingredient in the cultural poison.
     
No employer would ever admit to passing her over because she was missing that radiant, tooth-filled smile that Americans have been taught to prize as highly as their right to vote. Caroline had learned to smile with her whole face, a sweet look that didn’t show her gums, yet it came across as wistful, something less than the thousand-watt beam of friendly delight that the culture requires. Where showing teeth was an unwritten part of the job description, she did not excel.
— David Shipler , The Working Poor: Invisible in America
     
    The cheerful attitude must be employed if one does not want to be pushed farther from the herd, or expelled altogether. The optimism and laughter may or may not indicate that the person is enjoying himself,