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I found this comment in the Globe and Mail this morning. Thank you, Paul.

Paul F. from Toronto, Canada writes:

In any horrible event or castastrophe, we should try to learn something from it. Of course dozens of families have been hit with an irretrievable loss and many young people who were just discovering their potential will never live their lives and that is more than horrible, and we should think of and care for the victims. But we need to also understand why such a thing can happen.

I know that the tabloid press likes to harp on the theme: "in the mind of a killer" or "the heart of darkness" or "the devil's mind". But what do we have here? Was this 23 year old a hardened criminal? What picture do we see? I don't see evil. I see a human being who was clearly traumatized over and over. He suffered from serious mental health problems. How does someone get to the point where they refer to themselves as "piece of sh*t"? Clearly the guy was abused somehow, whether sexually, emotionally, or because he was Asian. It was VERY telling that reports indicated that Korean students at Viriginia Tech basically evacuated the campus on hearing that the killer was Korean because they were afraid of reprisals. It would be useful for us to find this out.

It is hard to watch this stuff, and of course the media business has its own selfish interests here, but I think it is time that we in North America start to actually take problems with mental health issues (sic). It is easy for people to dismiss him as an other: "lunatic", "wacko", "nutcase", etc. The sad fact is that he was a human like anyone of us. And we don't know what pressures, what abuse he suffered. If there was less stigma about seeking help, or people who cared enough about the guy to compel him into therapy, we might have avoided this. What makes me sad is how clearly red flags were apparent to the people around him; he was evaluated, but apparently he was not being treated. Hopefully we can somehow use this catastrophe to learn something.


Here's what I posted as a comment on a friend's blog on Wednesday:

There's more behind the massacre-gunman's make-up than just TV violence. He's South Korean. I must have taught a few hundred kids like him over the past ten years. Here in Korea, they fit right in, as a sort of norm. In America, they either act goofy and clog (a type of step-dancing) while singing Achey-Breaky heart on game shows, or fade right into the shadows hoping to be ignored. Online First Person Shooter games are quite popular but funnily enough, real pistols cannot be purchased in any store here in South Korea.

It's very lucky this sort of thing hasn't happened before. The Korean communities in North America are extremely close-knit. The church my parents attend has a Korean-language service in the afternoons, as do many churches in Toronto. The sort of isolation engendered by these types of communities can be nurturing but also extremely alienating when young people attempt to emerge into a broader society. I wish I had had a chance to interact with that young man. Some awareness of the strict Confucian culture he was most likely raised in could have helped his fellow students or professors break through his shell before he finally cracked. Just before final exams in his senior year. What an odd coincidence.


I found this in an article interviewing the Korean relatives in the International Herald Tribune early Saturday morning.

A pastor at a Korean church in Centerville, Virginia, where Cho grew up, told the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper he had once advised Cho's mother to take him to a doctor to check for autism. The mother disagreed, but prayed in church for her son to crawl out of his shell.

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