Monday the 23-year-old Cho Seung-hui shot and killed 33 people, including him. The news had barely hit the air before people started to talk about stricter gun laws. Being from a country where it’s not legal to own a gun, I’m all for gun control, but would stricter gun laws have helped Seung-hui? It would probably have helped the 32 others, but there would still have been one victim too many. I know the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” saying. It’s true, but as Eddie Izzard says “I’m sure the gun helps.”
Today I read that the police are looking into a theory that Seung-hui was copying scenes from the movie Oldboy. He might have been, but does it matter? At worst the movie could have given him some for of inspiration to how he wanted to it, but it didn’t but the supply him with the motivation to do it. And the motivation is all that matters. What makes a 23-year-old shoot that many people and then kill himself? How can anyone get to a point where life seems so hopeless and find so much hate towards everything? It’s not gun laws; it’s not movies, music or games. But people would like to believe it is, perhaps because those areas are easier to fix. Perhaps because we then know that we don’t have to blame our self. It’s easy to say after this, that Seung-hui was disturbed; Seung-hui was in pain. There where signs, people where worried about him. But no one had the ability to do anything.
I saw the clip that was released and I can’t get anywhere near the core of what he is saying. Comparing himself to Jesus and saying this could have been avoided. Saying they forced him. I’m sure all this made sense to him. I see that tape as his surrender. He realized that he had lost some battle that was going on in his head, and the killings were his last stand. I don’t know what he was fighting; I don’t understand the war he lost. I’m sure there are people who fight the same battle every day; I’m sure there are people losing the same battle every day. Seung-hui just made the battle visual, how many others die in silence? Now people would like to silence Seung-hui too, but I think he should be heard. He chose a terrible way to deliver his message, and I don’t think it should be condoned, but with so high a cost for a message, can we then truly allow our self to not listen? We owe it to the 32 killed and Seung-hui to listen and to try and understand. We need to look the horror in the eyes and understand. We need to ask Seung-hui the questions in death that we forgot to ask in life.
What will we learn from this? Nothing. People don’t want to learn, they want to live their sheltered life. They want to believe this guy was a psycho, he was evil. They want to believe he was everything but what he truly was; depressed, alone and a victim. A victim of a world than celebrate murders as long as they are performed by soldiers in other countries; A world where one half is dying of starvation and the other half of obesity; A world where you can walk among 26 000 people on the same campus and not find a single person who reaches out and touch your life in a positive way. When we meet each other we ask how we are doing, but we don’t really want to know. It’s a world of egos. If it’s not about me, why care. Why is it not okay to go over to a stranger and hug that person and say “it’s going to be alright” or “can I help you”? It might seem stupid, but who knows what it might mean to someone else, to be shown that there are people in this world who care. I know we are far away from a day where people will think like that, so I’ll leave it at three words:
4 comments:
People always want an easy answer when something like this happens. They want the assailant to be a monster, someone they could identify and stop just by looking at him/her. But the monster is just like us. The monster is a scared kid full of pain. We, meaning society, let him down. To him, we were the monster. He was living in a world full of monsters until he couldn't anymore. That isn't to say anyone deserved to die, or what he did was in any way justified. It means we will keep growing monsters until we learn not to be monsters ourselves.
My heart goes out to the families of Virginia. A song lyric comes to mind, "If I cry, it makes no difference. If I don't, I lose my innocence. I can't imagine how a mother must feel..."
"How can anyone get to a point where life seems so hopeless and find so much hate towards everything?"
Your quest to understand is part of the problem. Applying things to a question limit's its answer. Do you see the transference in the question?
Anyway...are you able to walk the talk of not being selfish?
I'm not sure what you mean god. It's simple that you loose something when you ask questions since they have to be limited for them to have any chance of being asked and answered. I'm sure I don't get what you are saying, so can you expand upon it or is it as simple as it can get?
I don't really think anyone can be selfish, I think that's what drives us, but thinking gives us the ability to go beyond the selfishness.
But no, I can only talk the talk.
The question I quoted is qualified by your assumption that his life was hopeless and he hated everything. Why did he do it? Why is was his life hopeless? Why did he hate everything? To understand is to limit. To be able to ask plainly, just, why. When you get that answer, ask why you want to know why.
The concept of selfish and not is tricky and I'm not sure I can express myself clearly enough. I don't care for the disparity between one side being good and the other being bad. On the whole I don't have a problem with selfishness. I think there is a confusion of what is good selfish and bad selfish, which is more of an economical problem than philosophical. You give people liberty and idle time and contention is bound to happen. Give them something more important to think about, like hunger.
Idiots killing idiots always makes for good entertainment.
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