Insanity Prioritized: Making Sense of the Virginia Tech Massacre 4-16-07

At the risk of seeming to politicize a horrible event when we should all still be mourning eternally, I will attempt to analyze the tragedy at Virginia Tech on April 16 2007 filtered through my own personal experience and worldly insight. This culmination of violence, coming on the heels of an entire history of ever increasing violence in our modern times, is enough to make one wonder about America and people in general. What's going on? Talking to people about it only seems to confuse me. Reading responses on the internet about the massacre increases my misanthropy. My faith in humanity is waning daily. People make myopic statements based on what they WANT to believe. Ignorance abounds. It has ever been thus. The Grateful Dead said, "Lets see with our hearts, these things our eyes have seen, and know the truth must still lie somewhere in between."

First, dispelling a myth: The myth is that liberals are too soft on criminals and other assorted terrorists and lunatics and always want to ask questions first and shoot later. I am to the left of a liberal. If I would have seen Cho and known his intentions before his rampage, at the moment of his insanity manifested, I would have bitch slapped him, punched him out and put him down, hard and fast, I would ask the questions later. Not because I hate him, not because he is Oriental and I'm a racist, but because it would be the practical thing to do to stop him in his tracks, prevent the bloodbath, and just because that is what he needed, some tough love, and to be locked up in a mental institution and given treatment. I would not stop to ask about how he may have been mistreated and abused, or how he may have been discriminated against by our society, I would not feel sorry for him or try to empathize with his twisted hatred of spoiled rich brats or take the time to decipher his mental illness. I'd get him the hell off the street, period.

But it is a moot point. No one knew, it is senseless and ridiculous to rush to judgments based on scanty information and personal opinion. It is absurd to think that being kind, compassionate and understanding, all by itself will solve problems of violence and mental illness. It is also absurd to think that cracking down and punishing criminals and insane people alone will solve the problem. Cho is already dead. We can't punish him. And we can't punish all the other mentally ill or hate filled people who are out there, if we don't know where they are, or who they are. And we can't help them and feel compassion for them either. To a very real and frightening extent there is nothing anyone can do about this kind of thing. To some extent we are simply helpless in the face of random, senseless violence. That in itself is a sadly sobering phenomenon that is very hard for most of us to accept and lends itself to a mass post traumatic stress syndrome. We may be loathe to admit the potential in all of us for insanity and horrific violence and an episode like this serves to remind us of that potential. It is hard to look at. In a sense, it is nothing new, this horribly human condition has been with us since the caves.

But, if you assume that what this boy did was symptomatic, then that implies a contagion, a sickness and a cure. We are a sick country, in a sick world. It is future shock coming to life. There are too many people on the planet. We live in the "too much information age." When a body is sick it exhibits symptoms, like swollen glands or rashes. When a country is sick it exhibits symptoms like exploding nutcases going on a rampage.

The causes are multiple. It is not any one or two things. It is all of it: The plethora and availability of guns. The culture of violence, the glorification of it in video games and movies and TV shows. The apathy and complacency of a lazy and fat American populace. A culture of privilege and entitlement. A general moral decay that has nothing to do with Christianity or secularism per se but more to do with a pluralistic society that leads to confusion and a lack of faith in natural intrinsic values, the fact that we look outside of ourselves for moral guidance instead of trusting our inner gods and goddesses. Inequality and injustice perceived or real, racism, xenophobia, sexism, misogyny, that does still exist all of which breeds resentment and frustration and confusion in small minds. The old dialectical Materialism, class warfare, between the rich and the working poor and the welfare class, certainly came into play here. The internet, the "world wide web" and the explosion of technology and mass media generating inadvertent techlepathies beyond our individual control that makes the world seem a smaller place and increases exponentially all of the above. Etcetera. Add your own causes. Fill in the blanks.

The saddest thing about this recent tragedy beyond the horror of the tragedy itself is the inevitability of it; the fact that we are becoming more numb to it, the fact that it was almost predictable. Another sad thing about it is the continued myopic ignorance that this event has generated. And I don't mean to lessen the grief of the families and friends directly involved. Lord knows, if it was my daughter who had been shot and killed, I would be losing it to say the least. But compassion is not enough.

So we know this is symptomatic. Lunatics and hatred have always existed but there is no doubt that these days are somehow more apocalyptic, more urgent than ever in begging for solutions and answers or we risk devolution and dystopia. As with the causes of this societal disease there is no one solution or even just a few. There are no easy answers. But it is up to us.

There does seem to be a schism however between two major paradigms: The get tough, shoot first ask questions later, three strikes your out, death penalty, zero tolerance, no sympathy approach AND the "liberal" compassionate, empathetic, understanding, try to help with the root causes, forgiveness approach. As I mentioned above, it is obvious to me that either one of these approaches by themselves is not effective; they are both an oversimplification anyway. It seems obvious to me that a combination of both approaches is needed. Why must things always be either or? And there are all kinds of things in between that could be done having to do with practical prevention measures, more astute gun control with the laws that are already in the books, education, awareness programs, new curriculum in college courses teaching things like comparative religion, tolerance, social skills, and watchdog mechanisms for finding suspect people and treating them before its too late. Etc. The experts can argue and implement these kinds of things.

From a philosophical point of view what is truly needed is an overall redirection in priorities. But the only way that this can happen is from the top down with grass roots cajoling and agitation. As long as our oligarchy is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on an occupation of a foreign country for "questionable" goals, and our corporations are being given no bid contracts to reap billions in profits which ultimately reach offshore tax shelters, and out of 170 countries our military has a presence in 120, and companies can spend millions on advertising in the super bowl for a product that will make us fatter and lazier, and CEOs continue to rake in salaries obscenely disproportionate to the company's profit distribution, and professional sports "heroes" can get injured, sit on the proverbial bench for a whole season and still get paid multi-millions of dollars for doing nothing, as long as this kind of big money spending continues with a complicit populace consuming superfluous product because we think we deserve it because Jesus wants us to be abundant, when 3 billion people on the planet make less than $2 a day, as long as this continues our priorities will be skewed towards inevitable collapse of civilization. All the great empires fell and they collapsed from within.

My point is not to excuse what this sick boy did and blame his rant and rampage on anything other than himself. The other side of the coin is that we all need to start taking responsibility for our own actions. That's the grass roots part of the solution. But it would only take a percentage of wealth/power priority shifts to make a difference in this world. If wealth and power and influence could be directed only half again as much as it is now towards efforts to actually help people, to enlighten them, to educate them, to eliminate injustice and inequality, ameliorate, alleviate the causes of resentment and misunderstandings between sexes and races, to demystify the wrongheaded myths and stereotypes that people stubbornly hold on to, then yes, the overall cumulative effect could be a brighter world where some one like Cho and people who "slip through the cracks" would be detected and treated before it was too late, or where some one like him would never even get to the point of random lashing out in rage.

Or am I being too naïve?