Originally posted by: InfoDroid
I wrote this originally for a thread at FE.com, but I figure I'll post it here too to add to the discussion:
I hate seeing things like this happen. I'm really sickened this past week by the media, who in their traditional style, are once again focusing everyone's attention on all the wrong issues in this case. The portrait they've painted of Seung-Hui Cho is that of a deranged, apathetic monster.
They focus on the fact that he's an immigrant.
They focus on the fact that he was "weird", he didn't act the same way that all the other "normal" (White) kids.
They focus on the gun-control issue.
They focus on violent video games.
They hypothesize that he was on drugs at the time of the shooting.
They call him a crazed psycho.
I'm still waiting for them to blame Marilyn Manson music.
But none of them have tuned in to the real reason behind this seemingly senseless act of violence.
They don't want to talk about the fact that all the "normal" kids had made his life a Living Hell day in and day out all throughout his childhood and young adult life.
They only mention in passing how in elementary school his teacher made him read in front of the class and as he began struggling through the words of a language that was foreign to him at the time, the other kids busted out laughing and mercilessly mocked him, saying "Go back to China!" Nevermind the fact that he was Korean.
They mention his "crazed, incoherent monologue" heard in his videos and written in his letters, but they gain no insight into his reasons for the attacks. They don't want to listen to his stories about how the "rich kids", with their cars and and new clothes and gold chains, still felt the need to boost their own ego by beating up, tormenting, spitting on a defenseless Asian kid who just wanted to be left alone.
They don't want to talk about the teachers who gave him F's on his violent writings and poetry because creative writing was "not an appropriate outlet" for feelings that dark, instead of encouraging an atmosphere where negative feelings could be vented, or recognizing a call for help when they saw one.
Not allowed to express the rage boiling inside him and with no one around to validate it, what was he to do but swallow it?
So, yeah, I can see why he never talked to anyone, why his roommates described him as a silent, unfriendly loner, having no interest in anyone. If everyone laughed every time you tried to speak, you'd be silent too. And you'd harbor a rage...and over time, gone unexpressed, it would build within you...with every sleight and snub and joke at your expense, not to mention the physical harms inflicted on you...it would quickly harden your heart...and I guess I can sympathize with that in some way.
That's not the way anyone would want their life to turn out. No one wants to be treated that way. Unable to accept or escape from the reality the "normal" kids had created for him, he created his own reality...he ignored them. He refused to acknowledge they existed. For years.
And finally, when that didn't work...and they continued to snicker at him when he didn't answer their questions or look at them in the eye, he adopted a persona which would inspire fear in others and show them once and for all that he was powerful after all and that he could and would enact that power over his enemies. He planned it, and then he carried out his bitter revenge.
Now, let me be clear, the fact that I pity this person does not mean I condone what he did. What he did was surely not the answer to his problems. But I'm saddened by the fact that no one cares to look at this person as a Human Being. They just want to write him off as some mindless monster. What he did was horrible, yes. But Cho was still a person like you and me, a person who at one time had hopes and dreams.
There is a poem by W.H. Auden entitled “September 1st, 1939”. In it, he says “I and the public know what all schoolchildren learn. Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.”
The media focuses on Cho’s pathology, but won't even acknowledge the same pathology or sadistic acts of the so-called "normal" (Good) kids and how their actions contributed to this.
And I'm not talking about the 32 innocent people who were shot on the campus that day. I'm talking about the murderers of the first casualty of this incident...Cho's own innocence. Who weeps for the boy who died on some nameless recess field long ago? Who weeps for the man he might’ve become or the life he could’ve lived?
On the larger scale, I'm talking about American society as a whole, the responsibility we all share as members of that society. I'm talking about the kids who cruelly torture countless numbers of the defenseless in schools across the country every day. Modern Frankensteins fashioning demons out of children, who will some day, with enough ill-will slung in their direction, grow into devils.
The problem is, people want to see everything as Good vs Evil. And that's fine for the movies but the real world doesn't work like that. We all have within us the equal potential to create good or evil in our lives and in the lives of others. There's way more gray area there than we like to recognize.
We owe it to our society to honor the victims by analyzing the REAL cause of this tragedy, not some political hot-button topic conjured up to win elections. Only then can we work to make absolutely certain that this kind of shameful and wasteful deed is never repeated.
--ID
Millions of kids are picked on and made fun of, but they don't go on shooting sprees. I understand that bullying can screw over a kid's mind and I'm not excusing it. Teachers and school administrators should have put a stop to it; kids who'd shout at him to go back to China need some good old fashioned physical discipline.
But you can't say the bullying and the bitter felings it caused are the only causal factor in Cho's rampage. He was referenced to counseling multiple times and blew it off. He didn't want to be helped.
And I can't really have any sympathy for the guy he became--for the person he was once, perhaps, but not the guy who chained the doors of the building before he started killing people. That's not something you can empathise with. And if his life was really such hell, he could have pulled the trigger on himself alone and saved the rest of the world a lot of pain. 
