A Note on What Happened in Virginia a Few Days Ago

I have said before that in a nation where inspiration and soul-health are regarded as less important than buying a nicer car, having the "right" friends, and pursuing as many forms of entertainment as possible, acts of violence will become increasingly bizarre, desperate, and animalistic in their brutality.

What disturbs me about this crime is not the university's apparent lack of foresight in attempting to inform students of potential danger but the fact that, even in the face of a mass slaying that repeated--spiritually, emotionally, and physically--the brutality of Columbine, no one seems to care about the social and spiritual dimensions of a culture that produces random acts of violence. I remember that in the days and weeks after the Columbine shootings, students of the school talked at great length about the social caste system that existed there, a system in which certain people were targeted for cruelty because they were not part of an established group. Eight years later, in the wake of a similar (but deadlier) incident, it seems that none of the dialogue that occurred in high schools and colleges as a result of the events at Columbine carries any weight--either for students, or for our society as a whole:

Once, in English class at Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va., when the teacher had the students read aloud, Cho looked down when it was his turn, said Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior and high school classmate. After the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho began reading in a strange, deep voice that sounded "like he had something in his mouth," Davids said.

"The whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, `Go back to China,'" Davids said.

To me, the brutality of a society in which an Asian student can be stereotyped, harassed, and mistreated at will by both teachers and students is alarming, but what is even more alarming is the following sentence, taken from the same Yahoo article in which I found the above incident described:

Another expert who has worked with mentally disturbed young criminals suggested that Cho's actions probably had genetic causes.

"This is very different" from someone who was bullied to the breaking point — Cho was clearly psychotic and delusional, said Dr. Louis Kraus, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at Chicago's Rush University Medical Center.

In my spare time, I have been reading The Holocaust Chronicle, a compendium of articles and photographs which leads the reader through a year-by-year account of the events that occurred in Germany and the rest of Europe in the 1930s and '40s, and one of the more disturbing aspects of the Nazi state was the extent to which genetics became an all-determining factor. Children's hair, eyes, and teeth were examined for specific racial characteristics, either to grant them status as full citizens or to identify them as targets for future isolation and liquidation. One photograph in particular displayed a child whose chin was raised by a medical doctor who, given the amiability of everyone in the frame, was in the process of certifying the child as "fit" for school and citizenship.

This photograph was taken in 1935 . . . and it seems that 72 years later, we are poised to begin making the same mistakes all over again. The doctrine of "survival of the fittest" assumed a place of first importance in a society that would see 6 million people killed in gas chambers, firing squads, and death camps--and it seems that this doctrine has more than adequate support in the United States, a country which routinely murders at least 2 million babies a year in the service of personal convenience.

I shudder at the prospect of the nightmares this nation can bring to the world if we, as a people, cannot find it within our hearts to abandon the culture of self-indulgence we have created.