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19day

2007-04-20

Massacres and other Post-Secondary Education

Filed under: General — 19day @ 22:41:34

It probably hasn’t escaped many people that something unfortunate occured at Virginia Tech, Cho Seung-Hui, killed 32 people, and then himself, and left a rambling legacy. His manifesto is a little odd, I would have expected something a little more obvious like the difficulties of love and life, but he goes on about revenge against vague ideas, rich people, but no specifics. Which is a pity, since perhaps some sort of coherent motive would have helped. But probably not.

The thing that strikes me whenever something like this happens, is the sheer futility of life. You can grow up, work hard, get educated, find love (obviously talking about someone other than me, thanks), get married, have a child, and the child grows up, and then some asshole comes along and kills them. Or your child before they grew up, or your love, or you, or you as a kid, or whatever. No matter what you do, there is nothing, nothing at all, that will stop some crazy guy, or even a merely determined sane guy, from wiping out anything and everything you cared about. And ultimately, with that kind of lack of guarantee, it does seem to be a pointless endevour… but people go with it anyway, since it seems to be worth trying, and just hope it’s some other person, or kid, or spouse, that gets killed by the next crazy guy, because there will always be another one.

And people always want to make sense of things like this, and so do I frankly… I mean, I can understand some guy killing his girlfriend for dumping him, a reprehensible act of course, but you can understand why… I can understand why a husband or wife would kill their kids and then themself, as punishment to the other and/or to spare the children having to be with the other. Horrible, but you can see how the hamsters ran in the wheel… but the ones where some guy (or guys, and of course, this is a guy thing, rarely do women engage in this crap) goes and kills a bunch of other people.. “I’m taking them with me”, and then the suicide… it’s hard to understand…

But, given the description of this latest mass-murderer, I think I do… mind you, that’s a lot of screwed up hamsters in that wheel. But I was actually informally ‘voted’ most likely amongst my ‘friends’ in highschool to go on a killing rampage. Oh, they laughed then, but that was still before Columbine, you know, when it was a school, and not a landmark in history. See, when you’re taunted and made fun of consistently, for years, well, you tend to take a grim outlook on people, and eventually, everyone is a potential enemy. Hell, to this day (or rather, in the days I was in university) I would avoid going down hallways with groups of people who looked mob-like (where they all knew each other) since I was wary of being insulted/assaulted as I passed. Old quirks die hard. So you stop talking to people, at all, go cold, go quiet, you just want to be left alone. Anyone who doesn’t immediately hate you will ignore you since you’re so damned cold and unfriendly, and those that do hate you (for whatever reason, mine was for being fat, hurrah) will continue to hurt you any way they can because, why the hell not? So then you’re entire interaction with people is defined by those bad ones. You just hate everyone… everyone is the enemy… the only reason that person (pointing randomly at someone never before seen) hasn’t hurt me is because they haven’t been given the opportunity yet, but mark my words, give them a second, and they’ll just spit on me. (interesting side note, I’ve actually been maliciously spit on by someone, how many people can say that?) When everyone is your enemy, the day you snap, everyone is your potential victim.

I’m not trying to justify or derive sympathy for what the guy did, in the end, it all comes down to your own decisions, of course, but perhaps his thought processes went something like that. Now I wonder what the fallout will be… irrational fear of Asians, stupid new rules (no making the gun gesture with your hand)…

What I wonder about is all the other people who were like him, and like me, in school. The quiet ones, the loners seeking their own seclusion, writing violent stories (I wrote a couple crazy things I won’t repost under advice from an attorney)… I guess it will be like it was after Columbine, where any kid wearing a trenchcoat was threat-in-waiting.

So to all you loners out there, smile once in a while, get out of the dark stink of the comfy lounge and write a poem about happy daisies on a hill or something, or else you’ll wind up in Guantanamo Bay.

UPDATE: I’d like to make it clear that the rambly bit above was meant to be humourous, speaking in that stream-of-consciousness paranoid way. I’ve been told that people might think something else. So I’d like to mark this entry with a giant flashing SATIRE sign flashing over it.

See the following video for explanation (skip to about 4 minutes in for the part I’m referencing):

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