(no subject)
So it seems the shooter at Virginia Tech was an English major. He wrote disturbing plays which were both macabre and disturbing. From the accounts in the news it seems he wrote a lot about the sexually abused wanting revenge. He was a loner, stalked students and was weird.
Because of this people from the university are saying they should have known. What bothers me is that the news seems to automatically correlate macabre writing with violence. I know of plenty of people who have written gruesome disturbing stories and yet didn’t take a gun to their classmates.
In high school I wrote a story where a group of internet friends decide to finally meet yet it turns out one of them was a crazed killer. I was in eleventh grade at the time and even had it published in the school newspaper. I had a few people ask me if I was ok and I always answered them with the same thing. “It’s just a story.” I once started a story about a serial killer in a high school. Maybe I was just reading to much R.L. Stine and Stephen King at the time.
Oh yes my point, sorry. My point is that you can’t judge people only by what they write. It’s a release, a way to vent your emotions. It’s a healthy medium of expression. When it’s combined with other behaviour I agree it should raise alarm. Stalking other students or taking pictures of them without permission isn’t very nice.
On a more sappy humanistic hand, if the students that had been laughing about him being a potential shooter had actually talked to him in a friendly manner maybe it would have helped. I don’t mean become his best friend but he was a student a writer. Why didn’t someone talk to him about his plays and ask about them. Maybe if people were nicer too him something would have been different, maybe not. We will never really know what went through his head.
I do feel for the victims. It’s something no one should have to go through. However the ones who died have moved on to whatever is next; and it’s their families that truly need condolences. Their families are going through hardships that I honestly hope I can never understand.
This kind of event doesn’t just affect Virginia, it affects the whole world. Every person who hears about and has any compassion will feel terrible about the situation. Many people would wonder how it would feel to be on the victims’s side and on the gunman’s side.
I have no clue how this will affect our society in the long run. It’s a terrible tragedy like all the previous ones and sadly the future ones. They only thing I can do is feel sad and try to be both nicer and less judgemental towards all the people I meet.
In the in end I think John Donne said it best.
Éric
* These are of course my meager opinions and are worth just as much as the the free blogpage it's written on.