The Virginia Tech incident: My take

To some, Cho is the aggressor. To others he is the victim. I think he's both.

From CNN you could see all the signs of someone who buckled under peer pressure starting from high school where he was teased and told to go back to China (he's korean). Who knows what untold stories there are, probably from elementary school about how he may have been bullied for being different. You could see it in his voice and facial expression from his home video.

The typical response from social leaders there is that well everybody gets bullied, big deal, so why must he respond so differently?

Hmm... where have I heard that before. Oh yeah, I once went to my internet service provider to complain about poor line quality and was told we dish the same crap to a million customers so why should you be any different.

These people assume everyone's like everyone else. They don't recognize people as individuals. That's how bullies operate, by depersonalizing their victims. That's why they can stick it to many people without any conscience.

I'm not saying that Cho is right in his bloody rampage. Taking someone's life under whatevere excuse is always wrong (and so is the Virginia law allowing people to buy guns without a waiting period which is supposed to filter out angry gun buyers) but what I'm asking is is society totally innocent in the making of Cho?

In his videos, he told of the aggravating conditions where felt victimized and pushed over the edge for things he had no control over like his skin colour and lack of wealth. He's clearly spelling out the stimulus and the response, the cause and effect, albeit from his little isolated mind which wouldn't have mattered under most circumstances. Except that it did matter as the middle-class community eventually found out.

The psychologists are now falling over each other in their response, saying that bullying is normal, implying that Cho should have taken it like a man. I was stunned. In a young mind, reality is painfully simple. Everyone suffers from bullying but some handle it better than others. But from what the psychologists are saying, if you can't handle bullying, you must be a crazy nut and a potentially dangerous person. And of course not a word is said about the bullies themselves.

Knowing the Americans, they will spend weeks on tearful eulogies about how beautiful and full of life were the victims who died (even though some may have been total assholes in real life) but very few will be introspective about why Cho became what he became. Its always a lot easier to blame than to ponder and even if they did, it'll just be a matter of academics and certainly not society-changing. Bullying is just part of growing up in America.

Personally being US-schooled, I've had people yell "hey chink" and fling garbage at me from moving cars simply because I'm Asian. It didn't affect me then and it doesn't affect me now. I learned to accept that its just human nature to feel threatened when someone different is in your midst and for you to be sidelined or ejected for it.

But if society wants to take this sort of hate as the norm, then it should also accept as norm that there will always be a one-in-a-million someone who loses it and kills half the town as society pushes him over the edge. I am in a sense puzzled by the outrage. Sadness yes but surprise no. To me its all just part of the impersonal, natural balancing mechanism of societies that includes disease and natural disasters.

One thing for sure, someone is going to make a movie out of this.