The
Malignant Resentments
That Erupted Into
Mass Murder In Virginia
By David Walsh
21 April, 2007
World
Socialist Web
The
Virginia Tech tragedy, which led to the brutal deaths of 33 people,
is an event that needs to be considered soberly and at length. But even
before funerals have taken place and the dead properly memorialized,
government and university officials are urging students, faculty and
the population at large to “move on.”
Some of this is all too typically
American and pragmatic, but much of it is distinctly self-serving. Those
at the top of society are instinctively hostile to any in-depth examination
of why this terrible incident took place. The same politicians and editorialists
who insist that “how we got into Iraq is not the issue any more,
but only how America can be successful now we’re there”
are also opposed to dwelling on the roots of the Blacksburg, Virginia,
mass murder. For a simple reason: American society is responsible for
those deaths.
Lives have been ended, the
lives of family members have been shattered. Thousands of people will
never be the same.
Consider the case of Regina
Rohde, 23, who survived the massacre at Columbine High School in April
1999 (the eighth anniversary of which falls Friday), where her classmates
Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris killed 13 people and eventually themselves,
and is now a graduate student at Virginia Tech working on a master’s
degree in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences. She was
on the latter campus Monday when Cho Seung-Hui opened fire in two buildings.
Rohde told a reporter: “It takes a lot of time to pick those pieces
back up again and continue on. Normalcy never comes back. It’s
a different definition of normal.”
The appeals to “move
on” from officials combine callousness and stupidity. This has
become a terrible cliché, repeated again and again, and directed
against critical thought and feeling. No, people should not “move
on.” ‘Enough, back to business!’ Here is the backwardness
and indifference of the entire social superstructure, which cannot and
will not look the reality it has created in the face. It is part of
the ongoing refusal to analyze or understand. The attempt to transform
every mass gathering at the Virginia Tech campus into a “pep rally”
has something perverse and unseemly about it.
“Normalcy never comes
back,” nor should it. Everyone in America and around the world
knows this is not the last such atrocity. This could happen in any part
of the country, it is a matter of the nation’s social pathology.
The coarsest and most ignorant
response, not unexpectedly, comes from the editors of the Wall Street
Journal, mouthpiece for the speculators and swindlers who have looted
trillions from the US and world economy. The Journal’s April 18
editorial argues that the Virginia Tech disaster is “the kind
of traumatic event that unleashes a torrent of pop sociology and national
psychoanalysis, so allow us to weigh in with a more fundamental explanation:
There are evil and psychotic people in the world willing to do great
harm to others if they aren’t stopped.”
On the contrary, much of
what we know about Cho and his descent into madness underlines the social
character of the Virginia Tech tragedy, its intimate and all too painful
connection to the present state of American society, both in terms of
the eventual gunman’s own disorientation and the inability of
the university system or community at large to care for him.
No one can argue in this
case that there were not warning signs. It seems that Cho, the product
of an arranged marriage between a man 10 years older than his apparently
reluctant bride, did not have a happy upbringing. As a child, Cho was
nearly mute; some in the family thought he might have mental problems.
His parents ran a used-book store in South Korea, which was not profitable,
and lived in a cramped basement apartment. They emigrated to the US
in 1992 with very little.
The boy had difficulties
in his new American school. He “was picked on, pushed around and
laughed at over his shyness” (Associated Press) as a schoolboy
in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Centreville, Virginia. In high school,
Cho earned A’s in mathematics. When he started college, according
to the Guardian, “his mother took his dormitory mates to one side
to explain about her son’s unusual character and implored them
to help.”
He spoke to others, his roommates,
classmates and professors at Virginia Tech as little as possible. He
sometimes referred to himself as “Question Mark” and spoke
in whispers. One of his dormitory suite mates told CNN that “he
was just like a shadow.”
Difficulties came alarmingly
to the surface in 2005. He annoyed two female students with his messages
and attention. His sullen and angry conduct in class provoked the ire
of one of his professors, who insisted that he be removed from her course.
When Cho indicated in December 2005 that he might kill himself, a temporary
detention order was obtained from a judge and he was taken to a mental
health facility. A doctor evaluated him and reported that he was mentally
ill but no imminent danger to himself or others. There is no record
of any follow-up or subsequent treatment.
Various professors seem to
have done all they could personally for Cho. Lucinda Roy, the head of
the English department at Virginia Tech, in particular, took it upon
herself to tutor him one-on-one after his removal from the problem class,
as well as to warn authorities. She found him deeply troubled, “I
was concerned that he was suicidal, that he was depressed. There was
a negativity. It was like talking to a hole. There was such an absence
when he entered a room. Everything just emptied out and it turned very
dark.”
Numerous people individually
attempted to help, but, in the end, the university system treated his
difficulties in a pro forma manner, as it does in so many instances.
The university could have done more, without question, but there is
no institutional or police solution to generalized social alienation.
A recent study of the Anxiety
Disorders Association of America (ADAA) notes that “Nearly all
survey respondents at both national universities and liberal arts colleges
reported an increase in student usage of mental health services throughout
the past three years.” They go on: “Schools see a growing
number of students coming to college with a history of mental illness,
increased anxiety after 9/11 and increased awareness of mental health
issues.”
The ADAA observes that “While
a variety of services are offered, many aren’t staffed appropriately
to meet growing demand.” It points out that “Every year,
19 percent of young adults in the general [US] population think about
suicide, and nearly 9 percent make an actual suicide attempt.”
A spring 2006 survey, cited
in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, of nearly 95,000 students on 117 campuses
found that almost half of them felt “so depressed it was difficult
to function as least once during the previous academic year; 16 percent
felt that way on at last five occasions.” Nearly two thirds felt
hopeless at least once. Nine percent had considered suicide. “More
than 93 percent had felt overwhelmed at least once by all they had to
do.”
Students face immense economic
pressures. A low grade, a failed class, a missed academic opportunity,
and futures are ruined. The number of students working part-time has
increased, along with the competition for jobs. Young people leave college
or university with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, a burden that
will take years to pay off.
And there is the general
climate in the country. The US has been in a continual state of war
since 2001, with government officials promising decades or a half-century
more of bloody conflict. The Bush administration’s terror threat
level has stood at “Elevated” (Yellow) for most of the time
since then.
Repeated warnings about the
risk of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons being set off in the
country, endless threats against foreign governments and individuals,
the most bloodcurdling language used by government officials (“We
either were going to kill him or capture him, and our policy is we try
and capture and not kill and if we’re not able to capture and
we can kill, we do it”—former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld)....
No wonder there is stress
and anxiety. What is the impact of all this on the most fragile and
unstable personalities?
No one in the media dares
to make any link between the violence America is visiting on the world
every day and the violence it visits on itself. No one in official circles
will suggest that the country ought to take a penetrating look at itself
in the mirror.
Cho’s videos are very
disturbing. He poses with handguns, pointing them at the camera or his
own head, holds a knife to his throat or wields a hammer in a menacing
manner. In other segments, he rails against the world at large: “You
have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience. You
thought it was one pathetic boy’s life you were extinguishing.
Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the
weak and the defenseless people.”
And: “You have never
felt a single ounce of pain your whole life. And you want to inject
as much misery in our lives because you can, just because you can. You
had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats.
Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs. Your trust fund
wasn’t enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn’t enough. All
your debaucheries weren’t enough. Those weren’t enough to
fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything.”
Finally, horribly: “This
is it. This is where it all ends. What a life it was. Some life.”
This is an extremely disturbed
person, but it is clear, if one listens to his words, that conditions
in society were playing on his mind. He felt many resentments. This
doesn’t justify any of his insane acts, but the resentments have
a real basis. He was mentally unbalanced, but that doesn’t mean
there was no connection between social life and what he did. And now
television analysts begin heaping abuse on his head, as a substitute
for taking the problems seriously. “He was a coward,” and
so on. This is almost a provocation, an incitement of others.
The resentments are real.
Huge social divisions exist on a college campus. Snobbery and elitism
exist. With Cho, the resentments were psychotically internalized and
developed in a pathological manner. The society denies that social classes
exists, it papers over social inequality. The contradictions emerge
in a malignant fashion, they explode in this anti-social form.
This is the ongoing price
American society pays for the absence of a progressive and revolutionary
social movement that offers a way out of the present impasse, for the
lack of class consciousness and social solidarity. The emergence of
such a movement would have a wonderfully regenerative and healthy effect
on the national psyche, and pose a mortal threat to the social and financial
status quo. That is why the ruling elite fears the emergence of such
a movement a thousand times more than it does a deranged individual
with a gun.
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