Around midday on Monday, students in the ICC began to overhear trickles of news reports from people who had checked their e-mail or caught CNN. It wasn’t until a few hours later that the full extent of the horror at Virginia Tech became clear, though the details of the event are still incomplete. The only certain thing even now, a few days later, is that we as college students, as Americans, as humans, have a duty to remember the 33 dead and the injured, the innocent victims of an unprovoked tragedy.
As we learn more about the gunman, the story has only become more chilling—Cho Seung-Hui was recognized by fellow students and professors in the English department as deeply disturbed. College students are notoriously angsty, and as one of his teachers pointed out, it’s not unusual for creative writing students in particular to use writing as an outlet for loneliness and rage. The psychological safety net of caring and attention, touted by almost all colleges, including Georgetown, was deployed. And yet, his anger and violence slipped through that net. Many who came in contact with him probably thought he would never take action on his words.
In the video he sent to NBC, it was clear that Cho’s anger was personal and premeditated. He railed against his fellow college students for conspicuous consumption, for decadence, for ignoring him. His anger is at least partly a product of our post-modern, videogame-ridden, “Bowling Alone” culture of violence. Something deeper, more frightening was also at work in Cho Seung-Hui, though, and acts like this one come from the same impulse that Coleridge called in Iago the “motive-seeking of motiveless malignancy.” But as much as violence and hatred are ancient human problems, this particular incident is frighteningly present.
We are a generation formed by an acceleration of mass violence. Columbine. 9/11. The Iraq war. And now this, the most devastating school shooting in American history. Yes, these are all unrelated, but they are all evidence of increasingly widening fault-lines in our culture, both American and global.
As college students in 2007, with this legacy haunting us, it has become our particular imperative to try to caulk these fault lines as best and as much as we are able, on scales both large and small. Perhaps that means smiling at the lonely girl on your floor, perhaps that means reporting a depressed friend to CAPS, perhaps that means training to be a peace-making diplomat of tomorrow. But for now, what it means is that we must remember the Virginia Tech victims in our thoughts, in our prayers if we are so inclined, and especially in our actions.
