But how can I help it?
Images and video were released last night of the VT gunman Cho, made up in the finery of disaffected youth: khaki military style vest, backwards black cap, and gangster-style guns. His eyes peered through the audience, burning with bitter vinegar, and he held the firearms out at his sides, in a Christ-like pose. One can imagine how like a martyr he felt. How like a god.
Although I know no amount of pain or suffering can make up for brutally butchering a room full of innocent people, I cannot help but feel compassion for him. He was another voice lost in the system. They did try. They sent him to a counselor and signed him up for involuntary evaluation. I read an article that said that he had to be tutored because other students were afraid of him. The teachers even kept a warning system to alert each other if he did anything too weird when they were alone with him.
I wonder what he said to the women he sent emails to. I wonder what would have happened if they had responded instead of calling the police. No matter how sullen or friendless someone is determined to be, it is important to understand that everyone needs love and a sense of belonging or they cannot survive. I myself have much experience with this phenominon in people I meet while playing online games, lonely people to whom the online community is all there is.
I cannot help but believe he thought it impossible to let his parents or siblings know how badly he hurt, how alone he felt. You cannot have children if you are not prepared to listen to their cries of help. Not everyone has enough strength on their own to live the life they are told they are supposed to live. I heard a man NPR that writes and talks publicly about his dealings with cancer say something that seemed so true and sudden I burst into tears. He said, "We are only given those burdens that we can bear". I suppose when for whatever reason we cannot bear those burdens, this is the result. People are far too worried about their own lives, their own business, no one has the time or energy to devote to helping someone who obviously needs it.
I cannot forgive him for the way he handled things, but I do understand, in a way- now, in death, he has all the attention he needed in life, all at once.
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3 comments:
I find it hard for myself to have any sympathy for people like this. Those who are unwilling to lift themselves up beyond their own problems to make themselves better people. This murderer blamed everyone else for his own suffering. It was jealously that ate him internally and he gave himself into it. There is no part of me that can say that he had it so tough that idolizing other murderers and acting out by killing 32 people is in any way justified. He owned a car. He was going to a good college. He had a lot of oppertunity that some of us never had. So to watch him on TV and say that people pushed him to this is ludicris. The real shame in this is that natural selection hadn't weeded him out of the population before this.
let us not misunderstand how I feel- his actions were neither correct nor justified in any way, I could not ever condone killing, no matter the stimuli. The tragedy is that this could have been prevented.
Could it have? He did everything in his power not to be helped.
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