By Silvia Casabianca
You may remember. In 2007, we were shocked with the news:
A Southcorean, “Seung-Hui Cho, 23, an English major, killed 32 people and committed suicide at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.”
As we were reminded by this deadly event, anger has the power to ruin families and lead humans to committing unthinkable acts.
In the aftermath of killings like this one, full-size WHYs hammer our mind. Seung-Hui Cho killed his mates without a word of warning. He had enough cold blood to leave the campus after killing two, email his videos and come back to continue with the killings on campus. Do we need to ask why?
It’s easy to excuse ourselves from any responsibility here by saying that this man was sick, that his classmates “innocently” tormented him because of his bizarre behavior and that they could not have anticipated the impact of the bullying on him or that the real origin of his mental health symptoms was in the poisonous effects of chemicals from his family’s dry cleaning business.
In a public statement, his sister said that his family, “never could have envisioned that he was capable of so much violence.”
Why not?
How is it possible that not one single person perceived the magnitude of the anger Cho had bottled in, anger which ended in such a fatal episode? Maybe we have learned to view anger as an inevitable part of life, a human “nature” feature, an emotion that does not necessarily need to be overcome, and that many even accept and justify presenting us with the image of a biblical wrathful Jehovah, or of a loving Jesus who was still capable of enough ire to whip merchants out the Temple.
However, we know better. And from this painful lesson and the many more mass killings that have happened since, we may learn that it would do a lot more good to our society if people understood God and Jesus as synonyms of joy and love and compassion.
Why was Cho so lonely that nobody helped him overcome his anger, calm his fears, resolve his hatred? After the killings, it is difficult to say that it was “none of our business.” We won’t be the same after mass murders happen. It is our business.
In addition to the profound compassion that I feel for the families and friends of those sacrificed in mass killings, at the level of my soul I feel also a deep compassion for people like Cho, a person who seemingly lived a tortured life, and I pledge to advocate not only for a zero-tolerance-to-violence society but for a zero-tolerance-to-indifference world.
These events might not be part of our conversations after a few weeks, but they will not easily be forgotten. We might choose to forgive the murderers and question the responsibility of those who couldn’t prevent the tragedy. However, I am aware that nothing positive would come from hating a murderer or just pointing fingers.
Of course, the above are not the only questions that came to mind.
If, from a spiritual standpoint, we are all one, what is our responsibility in this situation, as a society? “We fell down with everyone in that classroom,” a blogger said referring to the victims of the VA killings, and I share the feeling. Let the questioning that seek explanation to delayed warnings and delayed response to the threats be.
I comfort myself after such sad days thinking that after a terrible act of violence like this strikes our hearts, it, extraordinarily enough, also opens the gates to appreciating life in its fullest (imagine what those who were spared feel now!), to reflecting on contributing to building a compassionate society, of learning and teaching socioemotional skills at home and in schools.
Let’s take a moment each day to express our love to our fellow humans who are mourning dear ones after these tragedies occur, including the family of the gunmen. And then, take another moment to feel our responsibility to promote a world where we truly support each other.