Much has been written in the wake of the horror of the Virginia Tech killing, and nothing to follow here detracts from the unspeakable sadness of the act. What is less written is a reaction to the reaction, and hence a few words more.
It is only rational to respond to such a thing by asking: what can we do to prevent this from happening again… or at least to minimize the future occurrences of what seems to be the inevitable expression of a darkness that we might strive to avoid even as we would obliterate it from the collective unconscious and from the shards of the enduring species.
There have been references to Hitler, and to the contemporary religioterrorists, and, but for the level of vitriol, as vile as it was from the lips of young Cho, and the legions of followers, these strike me as not inept comparisons. This bears thoughtful discussion, but further to the subject of reaction….
…. “I looked into his eyes and saw evil.” ….as the witches in New England were burned for having evil in their eyes. “We can all be vigilant in identifying those who are behaving ‘differently’ and relay this information to the authorities”….a paraphrase of our president’s speech following the atrocity.
From my reading of the information there is no question that Cho was on and then over the edge. What I fear is that this event is being used to straight-jacket the minds and behavior of the most vulnerable youth, in a society where the imagination-strangling enforced homogeneity make it increasingly painful to breathe free. I wonder if the leaf-kicking adolescent lost in his thoughts for a period of time, not keen on sports and church, but dreaming of Yeats on his walk home from school, might be identified by a shrieking soul as having evil in his eyes. I wonder about the fate now of those who cannot adjust or refuse to adjust to a largely maladjusted society, and, in the early steps toward independence are branded witches in the hysteria of the masses… or, worse?, draw further into themselves out of fear.
An element of creativity is solitude. Good stuff does not happen in the Mall of America. When the solitude becomes extreme, one needs help and guidance. When the solitude emerges from the wells of imagination, one needs space… to grow. The right wing and the religious wrong have long capitalized on the fear of being “different”, wherein the self is identified not by its content, but by that which it perceives itself not to be. The primal abhorrence of the archetypal “other” runs risk of being codified in the language of our reaction to the killing at Virginia Tech.
Imagination and the ensuing monsters are an integral part of the human psyche… “We must rise to go down again.” Lead and gun powder and hatred, I would like to think, are alien to the human spirit.
“We can choose to create a homogeneous world of stultifying sameness. Or we can choose to maintain a remnant of the mystery that provoked medieval cartographers to mark the unexplored territories of their maps with the exhilarating warning, ‘Here there be dragons.’”
April 25, 2007 at 7:01 am
nod. keen. the social stratification will surely be propounded, yielding an even greater encumbrance on ‘how you should behave and what’s ‘normal”. -_-
April 26, 2007 at 4:03 am
‘normal’ cannot be reconciled as thus no agreed upon definition exists and anybody using it is surely attempting to pull the wool over your eyes. –burp
April 27, 2007 at 6:59 pm
Thanks, Tif. The MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory)- still one of the benchmarks for “normalcy” - was developed from the answers to a questionaire that was given to the visitors (mostly family) of the residents of a rural Minnesota mental hospital. This, imho, does not negate the obvious fact that cho was mad as a hatter, but i think does further your point, and the discussion.