Author: Shoshone Johnson
If you have friends or family who attend or are employed by Virginia Tech, this article is dedicated to you. While recognizing that it is impossible to assuage grief with words alone, I offer you my sincerest condolences. Having said that, I suggest that you do not read any further, or if you do, proceed at your own risk.
The day after the attack, the British tabloid Evening Standard published a story like many others in the U.S., although slightly more sensationalistic. “Massacre Gunman’s Deadly Infatuation with Emily,” the article’s headline blared, before launching into a tale of unrequited love between the psychologically wayward killer and his cute, perky classmate Emily Hilscher, sounding, in the end, more like a post-Jessica Biel 7th Heaven episode than a story about a massacre. The story turned out to be based on a rumor, which has since been abandoned by the media. This article is important, however, for the way in which it epitomizes our culture’s frenzied, irrational reaction to the event.
Cho-mania is ravaging college campuses across the country. We’ve become obsessed with the trivia of Cho Seung-Hui, the intricacies of his personality, the things that made him tick, the conflicting observations of his peers, his view of himself as a martyr and so on. We send money to the victims, as if they were impoverished or related to us. We engage in improvised, pop-psychological analyses of his “motives,” assuming there’s some insidious, devilish kernel lurking beneath all that unspectacular, even generic, suburban male aggression. Nowhere in popular discourse have we provided any justification for our hysteria, for our candlelit vigils, for our invoking the words of the commander-in-chief (who, reportedly, was “horrified”).
The discussion of motives will lead us nowhere. Treating Virginia Tech as some kind of “new Darfur” will lead us nowhere even faster. We need to be honest about this tragedy if we are to preserve the dignity of its victims: our hysteria is a symptom, a marker, of our unequal valuation of human life. The event is tragic because “he killed some of our own.” “Our own” doesn’t mean humans, or Americans, or even so-called White people, although all of these categories play a part: it means the small cluster of people who have elevated themselves to the position of “university student.”
Last year in my hometown, Oakland, Calfornia, five times as many people as the casualties of Virginia Tech were murdered. This is an atrocity five times greater in scale, “less tragic” only in the sense that it occurred over a longer period of time. Focusing on the Virginia Tech event as special and using it as an opportunity to dictate policy (are you in the mood for more guns or less guns?) is sheer stupidity. It’s focusing on a paper cut when the whole body is infected with a virus. Why do we not talk about “copycat murders” in Oakland’s case? Why don’t we know the names (crushes, favorite movies, biographical details) of these killers? Why don’t we discuss the “twisted minds” of murderers in Oakland? Are we more comfortable with their minds being “twisted” than one of our own?
Shoshone Johnson is a sophomore CTSJ major. He can be reached at shoshone@oxy.edu.
This article has been archived, for more requests please contact us via the support system.
