The World According To Anne Arky

For several days, since we as a nation and citizens of the world began watching the unbelievable events at Virginia Tech unfold as thirty-two lives were taken and untold numbers of lives were forever altered, I have mourned with the rest of the country the loss of bright, promising lives of people who were on the verge of their high flight into their futures. Indeed, the students and staff whose lives were cut so tragically short seemed to be among the best their generations had to offer – the diametric opposite of the disturbed and deranged soul who saw fit to take their lives as he was planning to take his own. People who are deeply unhappy as Cho Seung Hui was are seldom likely to go to their destination alone. As they say, misery loves company.

By tracing Cho’s actions in the days and weeks prior to his snapping, and investigating his history while at Virginia Tech and prior, the authorities have been fleshing out a profile of a young man whose shyness and anti-social behavior had seemingly alienated him from the whole world. Before everything is said and done and this incident is all over, the authorities will have to answer for ignoring the red flags that showed that underneath the shyness and anti-social behavior lay a seething rage that was buried, but rather than being dormant, it was growing in such intensity that anything other than a massive volcanic eruption was probably not even an option. Depression is anger turned inward, and by the time one of the members of the English department tried to reach out to him and help him get the counseling he so obviously needed, he was already out of reach of a mere layperson (even a learned one).

When she tried to persuade school and law enforcement authorities to strike an intervention on his behalf, both for his safety and that of those around him, her pleas were met with deft pass-the-buck “not our problem” dodging tactics designed to absolve them of any responsibility in the matter. This was their take on the situation, despite the fact that the Virginia General District Court found him to “present an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness.”

As the days have passed since the attack, tales of his shunning even the most basic friendships and, conversely, stalking and seeking out the attentions in inappropriate ways of girls he probably felt were “unreachable” have come to light and show that he himself was probably already beyond reach except by the most diligent professionals. As authorities have delved further into his background before he came to Virginia Tech, they heard accounts of his having been steadily picked on for his ethnicity, his unclear manner of speaking and other things. The average person might respond that “everyone gets picked on sometime”, but not everyone truly understands the difference between being picked on or made fun of and being targeted. Like his “martyred” idols Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the teenagers who put Columbine High School on the map in a similar massacre in 1999, it would seem that Cho was (or felt he was) targeted rather than just garden-variety teased like most people have been. Since most people can’t distinguish the difference, perhaps it’s time the authorities teach them and work toward putting a stop to it – not just because it’s wrong (it is, you know), but in the interest of public safety.

For people who can’t distinguish between being picked on and being targeted, I suggest you sit down and watch the movie “Carrie”, and when she erupts in telekinetic fury so strong she is able to throw cars at people, insert a more realistic vision of Carrie with an Uzi. If you can’t figure it out after that, you are probably the same kind of person who would poke a stick at a dog continually like water torture, and then scream out at the unfairness of it when the dog attacks you.

There is also the “Get over it!” crowd who says, “All that happened X years ago (fill in the blank with the correct number). Why hasn’t he gotten over it?” Try asking that question of an adult Helen Keller, blind and deaf since an illness took her sight and hearing when she was two years old, or Christopher Reeve a few years after his horseback riding accident left him a quadriplegic. The answer might be chillingly similar – some things can’t be gotten over. Or sometimes they can be gotten over, but only through intensive therapy. Everyone is born with a different psyche, some more sensitive than others, and sometimes the emotional abuse leaves wounds and scars that cannot be healed but people can learn to function around them. Sometimes they can’t.

I am in no way defending, condoning or justifying Cho Seung Hui’s actions, and like most of us, I am still trying to come to grips with the loss of the lives of people who probably never even saw or heard of him before they were staring down the barrel of the gun he thrust in their faces. This is not an entreaty to turn this dangerous psychotic into a “poor Cho” victim. What I am saying is that people like Cho don’t just “happen” – they are created, shaped out of their experiences. When Michelangelo was asked how accomplished the transformation of a piece of flawed marble into the striking sculpture the world came to know as “David”, he said that “David was already in the piece of marble…he merely removed everything that wasn’t “David”, including the flaw. Creating a human target has the opposite effect – it chips away at everything that is human until little or nothing is left but the monster that is in all of us but that lies dormant in most people. The monster is unleashed when everything else is chipped away and nothing stands in its way.

We all knew them – the kids in our schools who didn’t measure up to our standards of “normal”. You remember -- the girl whose clothes were faded and too big because all she had to wear were her sister’s hand-me-downs; the fat boy who was always the last one chosen to play on the sports teams; someone whose ethnicity or religious background wasn’t the same as ours; someone who looked “funny” or was just “different” from us. The outcasts. While it would be nice if everyone could be blessed with good looks, popularity, a “Father Knows Best” home life and/or many other good things, it isn’t likely that it will ever happen, but to make targets out of people for whatever reason is cruel and shameless – people should be taught early just to walk away from those they don’t like for one reason or another and leave them the hell alone. Usually the people doing the targeting are not the upper echelon of the social caste system – they’re on top, so they don’t have anything to gain from such actions. Generally it’s the mid-level echelon – the top-level wannabes who can’t quite reach that euphoric level of social nirvana, so to make themselves feel better about it, they find someone who is lower on the social totem pole than they are and terrorize them – as if being on the bottom of the social totem pole weren’t already bad enough, thank you. There are, of course, those top-level folks who might feel they are slipping in the social ratings and are in need of an ego boost, so they weigh in with their two cents, but usually not. So the targeted ones are no longer simply social residents at the bottom of the caste system with the rest of the social ne’er-do-wells – they are virtually disenfranchised. With nothing left to lose. Doesn’t sound like freedom to me (with apologies to Kris Kristofferson).

We don’t all have to like each other, but we do have to live here together on this planet. Someday people are going to teach their children that it is inarguably wrong and unacceptable to bully people and treat them as human targets, and figure out means of preemptive intervention when it does happen. Most importantly, they will teach that there are consequences from their actions, sometimes deadly, and sadly, one lesson that we can take away from what happened at Virginia Tech is that when the shit hits the fan, it is almost never distributed evenly.