I've heard a lot of media labels for this man, a monster, a nutball, etc. And each label is further reinforced by the people who knew him who call him "weird," an "oddity," someone with a "mean streak." Each of these labels serves to further distance us from the psyche of the disturbed person, to emphasize how inhuman he seemed to us humans in the first place. I'm cringing now everytime I hear him described in this way.
The problem with Seung-Hi Cho, the one I'm having specifically, is that he was all too easy to sympathize with, AND understand. Some of the stories told by his roommates, of Cho staring into nothingness while sitting for hours at his desk, while his roommate sat in the same bedroom with him, show how isolated and lonely and debilitated he was. Who can't sympathize with that? His one feeble try to make friends by revealing awkward, embarrassing and inept attempts about meeting women, ended with his roommates admonishing him, and Cho himself remarking that he was worthless.
No one can understand or justify the anger that kills this many people, but the anger too is easy to understand. Anger, in the end, is the one reserve we have that makes us feel alive. Anger seems to be the last refuge for us as human beings. When everything else is gone, you can always trade on resentment and anger. I suspect, in many ways, this is why talk radio appeals to so many shut-ins. We live in a culture of resentment.
Ultimately I wrote this diary to point out that the labels we're using now to insulate ourselves from this "creature" are in part--if not mostly--to blame for his debilitated state in the first place. They serve to separate us from others in the margins. It's all too easy to see this kid as a Korean, and leave it at that; he's a weird, odd, person, someone not worth the time.
My problem with Cho is that he's all too easy to understand, and even sympathize with. Maybe it's because I teach that I have this instinct to at least imagine what drove him to this. I know this isn't a popular view, but I'm amazed at how soon the discussion focuses on guns, on whether a teacher bearing a gun could have effectively ended the bloodshed, on whether Cho's access to guns made this massacre easier. The idea that we have a collective responsibility to one another is hardly addressed. We don't instinctively try to think about how we're tied to each other, how our society is essentially all about how we interact. Even when we're trying to imagine how he should have been helped, we always talk about referrals, go see a mental health professional, and if you're a danger, you should be stuck in an institution. When imagining what could have been done to prevent this, instead of showing some simple gesture of kindness and friendship, we have to imagine ourselves first in a shootout video game. The delicate stuff is not to be considered. This makes for a sick society, this is what creates the anomie of American society, our torn up inner cities, our antiseptic suburbias, our self-isolations: we're repeating the same mistakes over again in the aftermath of this event.
Lucinda Roy, Cho's professor, remarked that of course she bears some responsibility for Cho. There's always something more you can do to break through to this kid, and of course in hindsight she will always wish that she had done more (even though she had done a lot). We needed more people like her. I'm not saying she would have gotten through to him. There's no guarantee. But some of the labels being tossed by fellow students (I know students have busy difficult lives and can hardly look after themselves, a lot of times) and especially the poet Nikki Giovanni (who is INFLAMING the whole situation, in my opinion) make me cringe.
In the end, this kid will be thought of as the foreign wacko, the Korean killer, and we'll be able to shunt his kind off to the side and ignore them as people gone wrong. The backstory is already here. He went to see a mental health professional after all. But the real story will only be found in his manifesto. "You drove me to do this." Though I recognize this is a default desperate position of someone who fits his profile (even a cliche and caricature position, often parodied in movies like "Repo man"), I really think his words ring true in many respects.