Thoughtful
Apr 19th, 2007 at 1:04 pm by Maya
One of my dear friends back home wrote this privately today. With her permission, I’m posting it here. This conversation continues, but this was how it began and these were the words that got me to thinking, so I think it will be enough. I have such awesome friends.
I’m waiting for some extremely sloooooooooooooooowwwwwwwww reports to create at work and I can’t really do anything else while they process so I am going to write some of my thoughts about the man who killed the people at Virginia Tech.
I just want to be clear that I think what happened is awful. None of my thoughts on the subject are meant to belittle the horror that I think this event is and was—but I want to look at how our society functions and to analyze some of the response to the event because these are the things that float around in my head.
Why are folks surprised when this kind of thing happens here? We state-sponsor terror. We support the random killings of thousands of people in other countries for reasons that make as little sense to them as this man’s actions do to us. Solving problems or changing the minds of others through violence is the way we as a country are functioning…and although I am horrified at what happened in VA it is because I am already so horrified at what is happening throughout the world, how over and over again humans are embracing violence as a solution to their problems. I am not horrified because I am surprised—I am horrified because this keeps happening & society doesn’t seem to be GETTING IT.
Why doesn’t the media analyze the college roommates of George Bush and Dick Cheney to figure out why those two & their cronies feel it is okay to kill complete strangers, destroy homes and livelihoods, imprison folks who have committed no crime and generally commit horrors? Why is one man’s use of violence a crime but another man’s is “appropriate”? Why is violence in another country so much less important to our media and our society than violence here? Violence and senseless death are violence and senseless death no matter where they happen…but how is it that we give some more import than others?
And this brings me to another thought I had on this subject, same vein but different: I saw in one of the articles that I read that now federal money is being dedicated to prevent future school shootings like this…but no one seems to be seeing that the shooting was the end of a long story of abuse, including multiple cases of stalking and a history of an obsession with gruesome violence. This wasn’t a random shooting. This shooting made perfect sense…in the context of what lots of folks seemed to have known about this young man and in the context of a society that doesn’t have a culture of non-violence.
I just KNEW it had to have something to do with Bush & Cheney. It just can’t be that this nut job killed simply because he was a tremendously disturbed individual. To use this as a springboard for some political statement is, well, gruesome.
Do you actually believe that Bush & Cheney take this whole Iraq war debacle lightly? Like Cheney woke up one day & said to George “hey, lets go start a war”, & Bush says “yea, cool!”
One cannot justify the other, which is what I read in this. This whole mindset is just incomprehensable to me.
You think Cho didn’t know Virginia Tech’s gun policy? I wonder how many responsible VT students are licenced to carry, but can’t because of school policy. Or didn’t spend who knows how much time planning all of this?
I’m listening on the radio right now about all the bomb threats & lockdowns going on at schools across the country. Are we gonna blame this on the Bush/Cheney “regime”? Or on some other right-wing lightningrod?
Or get real & face up to “laws don’t stop killers, good people with guns do”& not run & hide behind political/social agendas. This well intentioned non-violence mindset actually puts all in danger by disarming those who are no danger whatsoever.
Anybody out there remember The Appalachian Law School shooting? How ’bout Pearl, Miss. or that Utah mall shooting. Armed, decent people ended all three before the carnage grew to the level of the VT murders.
Kevin,
This young man was floridly paranoid schizophrenic. Mental illness had a lot more to do with this than politics.
Kevin, you so entirely missed the point that it’s not even worth trying to straighten you out.
Why is killing of nonhuman animals perfectly fine with most people? If we eat this guy’s victims, will that make the killing OK?
This fellow Kevin above doesn’t seem much more intelligent than a cow. Why not eat him?
When our country kills many millions of helpless animals every day, how can it be any wonder that violence returns to us?
Kevin, you so entirely missed the point that it’s not even worth trying to straighten you out.
This wonderfully succinct remark applies to
about 90% of Kevin’s posts here.
I think I’ll memorize it for future use.
This fellow Kevin above doesn’t seem much more intelligent than a cow. Why not eat him?
Because then we would contract Mad Kevin Disease.
Being a vegetarian is safer than being a kevinovore.