Everyone is torn up about the VT massacre, as well they should be. People everywhere have cried over the deaths and injuries of those they'll never know, and that's as it should be too. The human race was diminished by a count of 33 through Monday's horrible occurrence. Quantitatively that's nothing on this screwed up planet. Qualitatively the loss is vastly greater, measured in the unmeasurable despair of each family member, each friend, and those who share the sorrow from a televised distance. God bless and help each family member or friend that is suffering from this right now.
But as we cry over this as we should, a few thoughts occur. I'm sorry to think these thoughts and more sorry to say them, because they aren't comforting to some of the people involved in this tragedy. I hope nobody at VT, none in a grieving family, ever reads this. But for those of us at a distance I think there are some questions we should ask because maybe some learning can come of it.
What would have happened if Cho's roommates had learned Cho's major? What if they had tossed their nonspeaking acquaintance a beer and gotten him sufficiently drunk to loosen his tongue? What if they done this over a series of days or weeks until Cho could talk and look friends in the eye without alcohol in his hand? This is a standard college therapy that has drawn out and saved the lives of who knows how many. This is not to blame the roommates, specifically. How many people did Cho avoid eye contact with? Couldn't someone have thrown this guy a life preserver? Couldn't someone have jumped into the water and fought with the struggling victim to bring him to shore?
Maybe that's the job of a psychiatrist. But that's what friends are for too.
A small person can disappear in a big school. Maybe VT wasn't the right place for a person like Cho. A small Catholic college in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by vineyards and drinking monks and the drone of the sister teaching Intro to Religion (a required course) might have been a better place. Maybe the students at such a school would have done what their counterparts at the big school didn't do. Cho, atheist though he was, needed saving in a way that maybe religions and religious education is suited to.
All the functionaries and professors in the VT bureaucracy who glanced at this "troubled student's" records, class submissions, and heard in passing his silence in class, what could they have done differently? When students in his creative writing class were alarmed and fearful about Cho's writing and asked that he be removed, was the teacher right in doing so? Maybe that was the last straw. A lot of professionals followed protocols, filled out the proper forms and fulfilled their professional responsibilities as outlined in the relevant documents. Many in authority urged him to get counseling. But who brought the counsellor to him? Why couldn't someone have stepped outside the lines and sicked a few nice people from the Christian group across campus on him? Wear him down with kindness until... a smile.
Beer or Jesus, both could have been saving. But nobody was their brother's keeper.
