Seeing Monsters

Like most of the world, my heart aches over the profound horror and tragedy this week at Virginia Tech. While I've refrained from watching a lot of the TV media commentary, it's hard to avoid it. The few news reports that I have seen that have focused on the victims, young and old, have reduced me to tears and physical ache... their stolen lives and potential, and the scarring impact this will have on the V-Tech campus community and beyond.

I've also refrained from blogging on the subject since I don't see relevance to this blogs' ostensible subject: ocean conservation. But while it may be true that I am a conservationist, first and foremost I'm human. And to not hurt from the many tangled aspects of this terrible situation strikes me as profoundly inhuman.

While reading through blogs this morning, I was particularly struck by the thoughts of Dorid over at The Radula. What resonates for me is not only her anguish over the victims, families, and campus, but also her recognition that it's all too tempting and convenient to demonize the gunman and disconnect him from societal responsibility,

I can understand why people want to characterize Cho as a monster... [but] there is, somewhere, a mother mourning for this boy.

This boy, whom society, science, and medicine failed because adequate treatment for his illness was not provided.

Now he's become a symbol of so many things, being used by Christians who want to say that it's the lack of God in the schools that leads to this behavior... people on both sides of the gun control issue... people who hate foreigners and are promoting White American agendas...

But they're missing the point (and many are just plain wrong). Sure, we all want to be angry at Cho and see him as a monster, because when we see him as human, when we understand that he is ill, we have to start addressing the hard questions. We have to challenge our own preconceived notions of the mentally ill. Behind the neuro-biological problems there was a young man struggling to do what every one of us wants to do: better our lot in life, find love, build friendships, and live a normal life.

I'm in no way seeking to explain away or defend an atrocity. But neither should we assume these events are beyond our comprehension. Tossing around the label "monster" makes it too easy to sweep the causations or our responsibility under the carpet.