Tragedies need a catchy title

My fabulous friend Hayley posted wise and well-informed notes on facebook regarding the Virginia Tech shootings, the consequences, and the chicken-with-its-head-cut-off media shenanigans that were inevitably to follow. Hayley says, among other things, that the gun debate is far from what is important here. If you know Hayley and are on facebook (and can therefore see her profile), I recommend you read her notes. They are thought-provoking and will put the following response into context.

 

I absolutely agree that the general gun debate is irrelevant in this situation. The fact that individuals in this country have the right and are often able to obtain firearms is far from the point. However, we have also learned that the state of Virginia does not require any sort of background check or waiting period like, for example, Massachusetts; based on what we’ve come to learn about Cho’s background, I imagine that a red flag would have popped up if any sort of check had been run. I don’t believe that would be an infringement on our rights as citizens, or at least no different than those we accept on a daily basis: no one complains about background checks to get a job (no one rational, at least), people even seem to understand why such measures are valuable; and yet working, just like bearing arms, is a right that we all have as citizens of this country.

It seems that people forget the very basic fact that with freedom comes responsibility. (In fact, I would be surprised if today’s average elementary student in the U.S. is taught any such philosophy in school.) But the average thick-headed American, as well as the average thick-headed pundit, would probably blow a circuit trying to figure out how to extract that small issue from the broader gun debate. I believe that such an extraction is possible, and I don’t think that more responsible protocol for selling arms would be entirely beside the point.

Regarding Cho’s “WHAT CAN ONLY BE DESCRIBED AS A MULTIMEDIA MANIFESTO” (nothing gets by in 24-hr NewsLand without a catchy title), I’m curious to know what people think about its being aired. Yesterday morning I got up to check my email and saw the headline on MSN about the package Cho sent to NBC. Naturally, I read the story, and when I thought I caught a glimpse of a link to “see the chilling images” I thought, Surely they wouldn’t play it! Alas, I was wrong. A few minutes later, I turned on the television and was greeted by Brian Williams explaining to me the course of the morning’s events before the footage popped onto the screen. My mind wandered back several years to Timoty McVeigh’s execution. Although I was young, I was frustrated that the court was going through with it after McVeigh had gone on and on about how he was going to be a martyr. I can only sympathize with the loved ones of those killed in the Oklahoma City bombing; but in their shoes, giving my son’s, daughter’s, friend’s murderer precisely what he wanted would not be my first choice. 

Anyway, I was appalled. While I realize that ostensibly the purpose of the news is to inform the public, I think airing Cho’s footage was ill-advised and in poor taste. I’m torn on some of the photos, but as for the videos, everything he said could have been easily summed up by a pundit, a psychologist, perhaps a precocious toddler. I don’t feel that his sermons were necessarily news in themselves because they were not clear, lucid statements about what his gripes were. Rather, they were the nonsensical, scripted blabber of a psychopath. And since everything he says was appeared to be so rehearsed and melodramatic, the videos are only a piece of what his real issues were and can only be read into so much by the general public. There was nothing in his footage that did not scream, “PAY ATTENTION TO ME!” He mailed it directly to NBC, for Pete’s sake. To broadcast his contrived, rambling monologue is playing right into his (late) creepy hands. While we all lament that because Cho is dead justice is unattainable, we might stop and consider that not doing exactly what he wanted may have been as close to justice as we could get.

On a lighter note- or a more morbid one, I can’t decide- when I did see his video footage and heard his statements, I actually rolled my eyes and chuckled a little. Am I horrible and insensitive? Or even worse, have I been DE-sensitized? Am I perpetuating the problem? I don’t take his actions and his grievances lightly, but watching his footage I was saying to myself, “Bla bla bla, teen angst, the world is against you, lalalalala.” When I was an editor one year in high school for our school poetry magazine, most entries for the publication were lame, boring, hammy teen-angst poems about pretty, skinny girls that suddenly are TIRED of TRYING to FIT IN (read that with poetry-slam inflection, emphasizing the capitalized words…if you are like me, you will instantly be annoyed). Or myriad versions of similar plots. Cho’s long-winded drivel seems no different to me. Surely, I’m going to Hell.

That brings me to my final point (his melodrama, not my going to Hell). Hayley mentioned in her initial post, before Cho’s background came to light, that we needed to focus on why this happened and what made him do it, as opposed to gun control, racism, immigration, the default investigations and scapegoats. Now, with all the additional information we have about him, I think we need to continue that line of thought. We should certainly examine the what’s and why’s, but we should also remind ourselves that not only was this not a typical gun crime and not a typical act of violence, but neither was Cho a typical troubled kid. He had been briefly institutionalized. He was mentally and emotionally disturbed and, as more and more information comes to light, it appears that he’d been that way for many years. We must investigate the resources designated to people like him, and what it was about his mental state that made him snap – as opposed to other disturbed people who DON’T go on killing sprees – instead of crawling back into our liberal-despair corners, lamenting the fact that kids get bullied and following the pundits through their usual tunnels of murky logic, shallow discussions, and trite headlines.