The Virginia Tech shootings were the big story in the news this past week, and like most people I was shocked and saddened at the tragic loss of so many lives. Putting this story into perspective, however, think about how many lives were lost in Iraq this past week? Does anyone care about that carnage anymore, or is confined to “yesterday’s news”? Or, closer to home for us here in Bangkok, what about the continuing violence in the border provinces of South Thailand?
It’s all senseless and horrible, and makes me shake my head and ask why these horrors can happen in this day and age. But maybe that’s exactly why they are happening: in “this day and age” the world has become a more volatile and intolerant place. The recipe is ripe for even more Virginia Tech type massacres to take occur, and I fear that this is only the beginning of a very ugly trend.
In the wake of tragedies like the Virginia Tech shootings, there is lots of talk about increasing security on campus, and even more absurdly, the “right” of students to bear arms. Talk about making a bad problem worse; that would certainly do it.
As a society are we doing enough to really look at the causes of these atrocities and prevent them from happening more often? People automatically label Cho Seung-Hui “crazy,” or use similar derogatory terms, but it that’s the case, what made him that way? Did his genetic makeup automatically make him unstable and violent, or did “normal” society do this to him? And if he was such a deviant, such a dysfunctional anti-social person, then why was he even allowed to attend classes at Virginia Tech, which is by all accounts an outstanding university?
Amidst all the press coverage this past week, I found a couple of pieces that seemed to address my own concerns about what triggers these killing sprees. In “Bully Rage: Common School-Shooter Misery,” Jessie Klein, a sociology/criminology professor at Adelphi University, had this to say:
“We need to listen to Cho’s words and heed his concerns as he eerily echoes those of previous school shooters outraged at what they perceived as an unjust school hierarchy that used them as the pariahs to reinforce their own social status and power. Yet in this tragedy, as in past school shootings, authorities ignore the shooters’ own explanations for their crimes, instead labeling the horror as merely an aberration. The mental illness that may well have plagued Cho is only a piece of a story.
“As we mourn the victims of the terror Cho wrought at Virginia Tech, we need also to ask how the bullying he experienced may have pushed him over the edge. Contrary to the views of experts like Former Homeland Security Director, Tom Ridge, who said Cho was just “deranged,” peers of many of the perpetrators of past similar crimes concede that those young men were bullied relentlessly.
“But children in our schools should not have to take it. My research has traced bullying as a cause of almost every school shooting to date and other research shows that bullying can lead to suicide, severe depression and anxiety, truancy, and dropping-out of school. We need to find a way to stop bullying in schools and to refute assumptions that this behavior is normal. These shootings are not just aberrations of deranged individuals. They are a reprehensible and unconscionable retaliation to common and real pain felt by students across our nation. Those who solely blame mental illness miss the real concerns about bullying these boys raise. We need to examine the persistently cruel school social hierarchies that so many young boys have declared the source of their unbearable misery. These concerns must be taken seriously and never written off as “normal bullying.”
Another columnist, Mark Ames, posting online at AlterNet, had this to say:
“What makes the Virginia Tech massacre more horrifying isn’t just the body count but the reaction of the living: The official fake soul-searching is more idiotic than ever, revealing, if anything, a culture that is so insanely delusional and incapable of self-reflection that it almost makes these rampage massacres seem relatively natural. The footage from Seung-Hui’s “media manifesto” has played on cable news on an endless loop for days now, and no one has considered the merits of his grievances — except to cast them as proof positive that Cho Seung-Hui was one sick guy.
“It is far more difficult to deal with the possibility that other factors may have led to the massacre, factors that are still too painful and close to us to consider. For example, how was this nerdy South Korean immigrant treated at his suburban high school and at Virginia Tech? What is the campus life like? What was it about Virginia Tech that made it the setting for the first student-on-student college massacre? And why were there copycat threats at campuses across Middle America over the following days?
When you use a word as inherently meaningless as “evil” to describe something as complex and resonant as Columbine or Virginia Tech, you are desperately trying to recover the amnesia that once protected you and told you how blissful and innocent your own school years were. The fact is that the schoolyard shooters were clear about their intentions: They wanted to “pry your eyes open.” But sometimes we don’t like what our eyes see; in fact, we refuse to believe what they see. Blaming “evil” has worked wonders for President Bush in Iraq, and it’s working wonders for Americans in understanding and stopping these massacres.
“If you pull back and rethink how you view these rampage massacres — if you can accept that the schools and offices are what provoke these massacres, just as poverty and racism create their own violent crimes, or slavery created slave violence and rebellions, then you have to accept that on some level the school and office shootings are logical outcomes and perhaps even justified responses to an intolerable condition that we can’t yet put our fingers on.”
For me, though, one of the most striking, if not disturbing, recollections of Cho I read this past week came from one of his high school classmates:
Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior who graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va. [with Seung-Hui] … recalled that the South Korean immigrant almost never opened his mouth and would ignore attempts to strike up a conversation. Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho’s turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded “like he had something in his mouth,” Davids said. “As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, ‘Go back to China.’”
Hearing that, it’s no wonder the kid was carrying grudges against his peers. But was there any chance of anyone helping him, of healing whatever mental illness he was suffering from? Or was this a hopeless case all along? And if so, the question remains: why was this disturbed individual allowed to remain on campus?
