You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life - Albert Camus

Saturday, April 21, 2007

I don’t know if you read the statement by the family of the VT shooter, but it’s agonizing.

“Our family is so very sorry for my brother’s unspeakable actions. It is a terrible tragedy for all of us,” said Sun-Kyung Cho, a 2004 Princeton University graduate who works as a contractor for a State Department office that oversees American aid for Iraq.

“We pray for their families and loved ones who are experiencing so much excruciating grief. And we pray for those who were injured and for those whose lives are changed forever because of what they witnessed and experienced,” she said. “Each of these people had so much love, talent and gifts to offer, and their lives were cut short by a horrible and senseless act.” … “We are humbled by this darkness. We feel hopeless, helpless and lost. This is someone that I grew up with and loved. Now I feel like I didn’t know this person,” Cho’s sister said. “We have always been a close, peaceful and loving family. My brother was quiet and reserved, yet struggled to fit in. We never could have envisioned that he was capable of so much violence.”

She said her family will cooperate fully with investigators and “do whatever we can to help authorities understand why these senseless acts happened. We have many unanswered questions as well.”

In a way, I almost feel the most sorrow and pity towards the family of the gunman than anyone else.  Humans are biologically wired to understand and accept death.  Every parent knows that there is a possibility that their child may die, so we take great care in preventing that from happening.  But there is, in a strictly biological sense, a psychological mechanism by which we all understand that anyone can die at any moment.  They might get a disease, or get lost hiking, or choke on some food, or be hit by a car, or any other means.  Death is a part of life.

What is not a part of life is knowing that someone in your family, someone you knew and cared about and loved, could do such a horrific, unspeakable act.

Let me give you an example.  When I was in college I had a friend named Steve.  Over the summer, after our freshman year, Steve and some other friends were supposed to go out to a club.  He said he wasn’t feeling well and was going to take a pass.  He climbed into bed and went to sleep.  As it turns out he had viral pneumonia, his lungs filled with fluid while he slept, and he died.  He was 19 years old.  The worst aspect was that his parents were away on a short vacation, so by the time they got home he’d already been dead for a two or three days. 

It was tragic, agonizing, and senseless.  But, death is a part of life, and as difficult as it was for them to accept that he was gone, our biological mechanism for dealing with the concept of death helped them make sense of it.  Now, suppose that instead of dying, Steve had gone to college, shot 33 people, and then taken his own life.  Which do you think would be easier for his parents to deal with, the tragic death of their son due to viral pneumonia, or the fact that he’s the worst mass murderer in the history of America, who took his own life?

I’m not trying to mitigate the pain experienced by the families of the victims in any way.  The VT shooting is an unspeakable horror.  But, really, I can’t imagine being a member of the Cho family, and having to spend the rest of my life filled with the guilt of what he has done, wondering if there was anything I could have done to prevent it.

Awful, just awful.