tabular_rasa | Thoughts on the Events Following

I'm a little wary about posting this, because in the past my reaction to tragic events has taken offense. I have even been accused of being insincere. (Though I don't see how, two days later, unaffectedness can even be an option). These are my frank and open considerations. My intentions aren't to offend anyone (though why on earth would they be?). I just want to get my feelings out-- even just so I can see them.

Keep in mind that frankness, for me, will always involve a certain amount of big-picture perspective. That's just how I think. Keep in mind, too, my own principles regarding the worth of every human life and the fundamental capacity for goodness and humanity in everyone. To regard a murderer as a human is in no way denigrating to the lives of any he took.

A few things really bother me about the aftermath of Monday's events. I hate the way we're reacting. Just as I hated the aftermath of 9/11. The fears, the blame, the speculation before all the information is even present.

We jump to campus security and gun laws-- if Cho Seung-Hui hadn't been able to buy one, if the campus had gotten the word out faster.

We jump to racial profiling-- half the news titles were opened with: "Korean Student," and Korea feels obliged to denounce connection with him, nevermind he's been a US resident for years.

We even jump to freaking censorship. I don't want to guess at how the revelation of Cho Seung-Hui's manuscripts will affect college policies in regards to free speech. In hindsight, yes, it fits very nicely that a person who ended so violently and destructively should have written in the same matter. It seems like a clue to prevention. Yet think of what that means! Even logic follows that though school shooters may write violently, those who write violently are not necessarily school shooters. So unless we're suggesting that every person who submits a controversially violent manuscript ought to be psychoanalyzed, there's, well, really nothing that could have been done in terms of using a person's written work as a predictor of future behavior.

Most of all, I'm bothered by how people react in regards to Cho Seung-Hui himself. Certainly, he's an unnerving figure to premeditate such an ordeal (complete with videos and documented manifesto) and follow through with it. But is he really damnable? Is he really something to fear? (Even those who are most angry at him-- would you really wish him that power?).

The only thing I really feel is bad for him.

I hope I am not pushing too far, suggesting his humanity. And so soon. That seems to be what I do, though-- what I've always done-- from literary villains to the terrorists of 9/11. It's natural to sympathize with the victims, and I do (I mean, really, that goes without saying!). Maybe it takes a little more effort to empathize with the shooter. Yet how can we really ever know the answers, really understand, really know the best preventative strategy, until we know him? Gun laws and on-the-spot police forces would not have stopped the anger and isolation that plagued this young man. Even if he had been expelled for his violent writings his fall semester, even if he hadn't been sold a gun, even the police mowed him down after fifteen minutes-- he would still have remained stifled by his overwhelming sense of isolation and inferiority and trapped in the fantasies of violence that clearly plagued him. And that's a tragedy, too.

Next to the innocent lives lost, that seems rather small-- one young man's depression or antisocial isolation. He seems like a worthless, despicable person, undeserving of the claim he lays over his victims. But this worthless person caused a rift in so many lives he may never otherwise have even touched. I think that demands our attention.

I want to know what was wrong with him-- not VT campus, not the state of Virginia. Was he psychopathic and antisocial? Was there some emotionally toxic imbalance of brain chemical that caused his anger and loneliness? (And, if so, are we really going to accept that people like this just "exist," and the best we can do is reshape our lives to accommodate them in order to be safe?) Or perhaps do we have a piece of the blame-- our generation, that is? What is wrong with us? I don't mean our gun laws and campus security. Did he learn to be lonely from us, forced out of association with his peers until he accepted it as his fate? Did we reject him somehow, even unknowingly? Did we offer him the idea of violent vengeance through our culture of beautiful gore? And is it possible he even presented us with an inkling of truth about ourselves in his disjointed manifesto?

I don't have any answers. I don't have any real speculation. I just have more and more questions, on top of those everyone's already asking.

In the meantime, all I have is support for the victims and their loved ones. I wish swift and painless recovery for the wounded, and support for the bereaved. And I wish hope for our generation-- that we can be the next "Greatest Generation" or whatever as we're supposed to be, not felled by the hands of our own.