Cho's Dark Manifesto Points to Lessons Not Learned

We may want to stick our heads in the sand because the images and what they represent offend our sensibilities. I understand that many are in excruciating pain from the loss of loved ones and cannot bear the thought of looking at the person who inflicted this heartache. On the surface this appears to be a clear case of a mentally disturbed individual venting his rage on innocent lives and therefore, our habit is to dismiss it in our minds as an abnormality, a deviation from the norm, but in actuality this is indicative of a very complex phenomenon exemplifying the direction we are going in as a country and ultimately, a species. Our modern culture has seen an over abundance of violent TV shows & movies, violent lyrics in music, cruel and angry reality shows, portrayal of mean-ness as the ultimate form of entertainment. There is a preoccupation with body image, physical appearance, money and so on... look at us, we worship the likes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan whose lives are a series of partying, drugs and sex.... Our children are excessively exposed to these themes, images and messages at a very young age. Psychology 101: Children live what they learn. When the predominance of the information children receive from society is of this nature, it then becomes their sense of reality. They believe that these are the things that constitute our experience and existence as human beings?. where is the over abundance of images depicting love, compassion, kindness? We are creating a generation of superficial, plastic, selfish people where the great search in life is about excess and trying to appease an inexhaustible craving for physical pleasure. Our greatest error is thinking that each thing is separate unto itself. For every action there is a reaction and everything is connected, so we are sadly misguided in thinking that what we portray in the name of entertainment does not have a tremendous impact on our children's psyche and present the foundation of their beliefs..... There is no one thing that causes an individual to reach breaking point, instead it is the culmination of everything he has ever experienced in his life and the impressions left upon his psyche, lest we forget all those children who endure physical, sexual, mental and emotional abuse. These experiences are assimilated and ultimately create a toxic fusion of energies and emotions. Children today are feeling more alienated and dis-jointed than ever, as parents are caught up in the "fight for survival" spending more time and energy at work ultimately leaving less and less time for raising their children in a balanced and harmonious manner. Whilst in the mind of the parent what they are doing is in the best interest of the child as they can provide more material things.... the truth is, a child would much rather a sincere hug and the attention of a parent than the latest barby doll or video game.... Do you not think that the 4-6 hours they spend playing bloody video games or watching television shows that depict screaming, cruel and out of control people are laying the foundation of their belief system? Needless to say, the horse is already out the gate and it will take awareness from the majority to recognize it is heading in the wrong direction. I pray that we wake up before many more are unnecessarily slaughtered by these mostly affected minds who in the midst of their darkness, are screaming for us to heed the call....

Don't be so judgmental of schizophrenia(e.g. multiple personality disorder). It does not always lead to violence. It can be creative in the hands of some. The characters are responsible for their own behavior and what they say. Don't defame all Schizophrenics just because Cho lost his moral compass, or at least did not share our moral values. It can be an asset to a script writer to be blessed with multiple personalities.

Yes, I'm sure internal suffering is a small price to pay for a good movie!!! (sarcasm)

Whereas neither I nor the evidence condones the idea that mental illness is particularly helpful for those in creative fields, I must object strongly to the original post's statement that 'untreated schizophrenia almost always leads to violent behavior'. This is simply untrue, as data show that 'normal' individuals are more likely to be violent than schizophrenics (whether treated or untreated).

We do nothing to help our understanding of human behavior, and confuse ourselves about the real causes of violence, by stigmatising those who are already unfortunate enough to have psychological, or even psychiatric, difficulties.

Piet de Best

Guy Incognito - I don't watch teevee or listen to the radio. In order to fix a problem you have to understand the problem. If you want to get rid of that problem you have to "strike at the root". If you don't pull a weed up from its root what happens? It grows back. QED. Will we ever learn? That remains to be seen.

If Cho Seung-Hui had not been unreasonably fearful, had used common sense and not had a gun, a beautiful young man would still be alive. There are too many Cho Seung-Hui out there too many little people of limited social skills, limited practical intelligence and limited conscience who not only fail to think before they act but refuse to take responsibility for their actions.
Our Constitution does not give us rights without responsibility, so where is the personal responsibility in this?

We have the NRA to thank not only for the deletion of personal responsibility from the equation, but for all the people who will die as the result.

Guns are not fun, they are not macho. " No, toys are fun, and guns are not toys. Some people don't enjoy shooting sports.No one needs an AK-47 to hunt deer.I sooo was glad when my gun-toting next-door-neighbor moved and took his arsenel [sic] with him for I always dreaded an accident. I fear guns. I don't see why you would be against licensing and basic government control of guns until you are either (a) a criminal or murderer or Robert Blake or (b) an anti-government nut in the lineage of McVeigh.
Especially now, in the age of terrorism imported and domestic and violent crime, it all the more important for us to gain any control we can over guns and to try to keep them out of the hands of all the dangerous nuts on our streets.Guns are so complex that special training is necessary to use them properly, and so simple to use that they make murder easy.
Guns cause violence, which is why there are so many mass killings.

Where did he learn his commi ideas from? "You had everything you wanted," Cho says in one video, speaking directly into the camera. "Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your trust fund wasn't enough. Your vodka and cognac weren't enough. All your debaucheries weren't enough. Those weren't enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything." He learned it from his commi college professors. Where is McCarthy when we need him? We need to start a purge.

Cho was not loved. If he was loved, he would not have done what he did. Love that loner in class today so he doesn't hurt people tomorrow. Students, please go to school to learn and not to show off your wealth. Somebody may take offense at the show off of wealth and hurt people. If we as a society would love and spread sunshine and not to be a show off the world would be more peaceful. Peace and love to all.

Everyone posting about all the shootings blaming mental health, the NRA and whomever its all wrong. American has changed so much from its original value's that no one can make a statement as to why Cho committed this act. America operates, and has for quiet sometime in the gray area. We as a nation have no right or wrong values anymore. There is only two colors back or white (right or wrong) we don't need this ambiguous crap (the gray scale). Should everyone blame the NRA for this crime (no), drugs can't be stopped and they kill more people and cause people to kill more than anything else, so lets just leave the NRA out of this one. Everyone should have the right to bear arms. One would think that a family member or relative would know when something is awry with a family member, Cho's professor's did. When parents don't have or take time to en still the right or wrong syndrome into there offspring and not the ambiguous gray scale then expect things to go awry.

GUN DEALER DEFENDERS AND THE LUNATIC FRINGE

Today, two days after the horrific loss of 33 American lives at Virginia Tech University, CNN.com reported that over 300 people were maimed and murdered in Iraq, most of them in the main central marketplace of Baghdad that Senator John McCain claims is so much safer since the "surge". The death count was at least 171 and rising as of this morning.

Some folks might call it "insensitive" to compare these two examples of modern-day carnage within the same immediate context. I beg to differ, as rather, it remains highly "insensitive" that an American media continues to downplay and "backburner" the much worse ongoing carnage that Karl Rove and Company are directly responsible for in the Middle East, while our highly "insensitive" general population goes right on purchasing SUV's and shopping at the mall, as if the loss of teachers, friends, husbands, wives, students and children don't mean anything at all, unless they happen to be our own.

And meanwhile, the Lunatic Fringe have crawled out in full force from under their slimy NRAolithic rocks, to encourage the ongoing insanity of unbridled ownership of firearms in our homeland of the not-so-free and overwhelmingly naive to continue, while our "passionate conservative" president neatly sidesteps the issue. The word "gun" is nowhere to be found in the Constitution, which was purposely very carefully worded by those who drafted it, in particular, the first ten amendments.

The 2nd Amendment does not mention either "guns" or "firearms". The Constitutional framers chose to use the much broader term "arms", which did not mean the same thing as "firearms" to the framers of the Constitution, any more than it means the same thing today. Thomas Jefferson owned his own private cannon, the largest military weapon available at the time. The term "arms" at the drafting of the 2nd Amendment, included anything used in warfare, for hunting, for personal defense and/or, for personal attack.

Today, that would include nuclear and conventional bombs, all manner of chemical and biological weaponry and soon to be included, space-ray weapons. Either the NRA and the rest of the Lunatic Fringe are going to push to allow private companies with satellites to possess their own private space-ray weapons, owners of private jets to mount their own private nuclear arsenal and allow their own next door neighbors to manufacture Anthrax whenever they wish, or they are going to restrict the 2nd Amendment.

There is no middle ground. Using the 2nd Amendment as a shield to allow unregulated ownership of modern firearms is without rational foundation and displays no more Constitutional logic than allowing individual Americans to personally own and possess unlimited nuclear and biological weaponry. I have long wondered what Charlton Heston would do if Michael Moore decided to mount a nuclear bomb on a Hummer and parade around Beverly Hills with a peace sign attached over a loudspeaker blaring, "long live the 2nd Amendment."

Sounds like a great Lethal Weapon script to me. Mel Gibson could play the racist bigot chauffer and Danny Glover could play the naked descendant of a slave, target of a racist bigot, running for dear life up ahead, shouting "the sky really is falling this time". Meanwhile, the hole in the sky and in our American soul keeps on growing, the planet keeps on getting warmer and the great river of Babylon tears keeps on flowing.

And may God comfort and bless the families and friends of those who lost a loved one at Virginia Tech University; and may they forgive me for not being able to believe that the loss of an American student in Virginia is any more or any less significant to God, than the loss of an Iraqi student in Baghdad.

I took the point of this article to be that if guns were not as accessible as they are, this would not have happened the way it did. Obviously there are other factors that must have played into it, whether it was his mental health, violence in video games and television, a major social skills deficit, his life story - whether he was unloved, had a speech impediment, depression or dangerously low self esteem wasn't the point of the article the way I read it.

There are people all over the place with one, some or all of these issues. Clearly here and there one will begin to creep toward the ledge in terms of his or her personal answer to their own suffering or confusion. If these people have no sense of where to turn in terms of mental health care and have such easy access to guns, this type of tragedy will happen again and again.

Take away the guns and these fragile people will have to react in other ways. They may sometimes break down as Cho did, and people may get hurt then too - if they really go off, but massacres? Not likely.

If anyone had the thought to look beyond domestic media outlets, you would have seen a different picture of Cho. He suffered initially from autism, not any sort of psychiatric condition. This autism made him sound "incoherent" to his American classmates who bullied him over his inability to speak clearly. The bullying went on throughout high school--clearly the cruelest school years for those seen as outside the upper class cliques.

The fact that Cho's mother was in denial over her son's autism was also lost in the mainstream (and apparently the alternative) media. What I learned about this case could only be found in the Asian-Pacific edition of the International Herald Tribune's website. There has also been a racist backlash against anyone in the Korean-American community. One of the first things Korean-Americans admitted was their hope that Cho was not Korean. Some Korean-American kids have been spit on, or have suffered worse as a result of this racist, anti-Korean immigrant backlash.

It is all too easy for non-clinicians to do post-mortum psychiatric diagnoses on those who commit violent acts. And many who do have to deal with legitimate psychiatric disabilities also suffer from stigma, one created by these non-clinicians who are so certain of their "expert" diagnosis.

We have a sick culture that considers the "lite" version of human experience as preferable to deep, authentic human emotions no matter how messy they feel. This culture tells those of us who are in any way different that we are "weird" and that no one will like us for who we really are. If we have a learning disability that is undiagnosed, then we are doubly damned in the eyes of the "in-crowd" as well as the media.

Cho was not a monster, at least no more of a monster than the ones who publicly humiliated him for his autism in the first place. Aren't the real "monsters" the ones who profit by continuing to burn him in effigy within the media? There is a saying from my childhood that when you point one finger at others, you point three fingers at yourself.