A public entry. Don't get used to it.
My original plan was to go to bed early tonight in acknowledgement of the fact that I’ve been burning the candle from both ends for about two weeks, but I stayed up to watch the 10pm news in order to learn about the “media package” that Cho Seung-Hui sent to NBC chock full of photographs, videos, and even a manifesto (personal essay) explaining why he did what he did. The most sickening thing about this? He had two hours to do it in-between his shooting rampage. After he mailed his package, he went over to a building on campus and shot a bunch more people.
This guy got exactly what he wanted, infamy. For the next several months and years, people are going to try and pick apart his brain to find out why he did this, and how one person could be so disturbed that they’d feel inspired to murder 32 people before taking his own life. Why can’t people just shoot themselves anymore? There is no infamy in suicide, unless you’re Anna Nicole Smith. Thanks to this elaborate media package, we’re going to remember this guy like we remember all other garden variety terrorists… and eventually he might drift into a psychopathic hall of fame shared by the Unibomber, Timothy McVey, and David Koresh.
Does anyone remember the names of the two trench-coat kids that shot up Columbine High School? I don’t. I remember the affects of Columbine - such walking out of Corcoran High School in Syracuse for multiple post-attack bomb threats while I was student teaching…and even the affects of Columbine today. Now, as a sixth-year teacher, I sit through the Rachel’s Challenge assembly and watch videos about the girl that “said yes.” Every once and again someone brings up Columbine as a point of discussion, mostly to talk about the danger that we seek in kids and how can we, as teachers, tell if someone is on the brink of a murderous rampage. We forward each other e-mails about “that kid” who cleaned out his locker one day with the intention of going home and killing himself when he dropped his books on the way and met a new best friend, and we refer dozens of “at risk” kids to short-staffed school psychologists who don’t have the time or the resources to give them the help that we need. What can we really do?
What happened at Virginia Tech should not be surprising, and maybe for a little while it will be a wake-up call… but it’s not going to stop the fact that people are sick, sometimes without good reason, and will continue to do stuff like this for infamy.
Sadly, I wonder how many people will remember the name of Liviu Librescu, a 76 year-old professor who managed to survive the Holocaust, but not the wrath of an angry Asian kid with a gun. Librescu, an engineering science and mechanics lecturer who was teaching the building that Seung-Hui shot up, was shot about five times while helping his students escape. Who knows how many lives he saved because he bravely barricaded the door? I’m not just saying this as a teacher, but that man will have my respect for the rest of my life.
SO what’s my point? I’m not really sure if I have one… I guess I’m just saying that we have a lot of problems in our society, and our media will be an outlet for anyone who wants it. I can only hope that if someone decides to sell Seung-Hui’s manifesto that all of the proceeds garnished from it will be donated to the families of the people that were shot: some because they were targeted, and some simply because they were in the way.