Follow up

Aubrey said it: having lived in Korea, Cho Seung Hui''s rampage in Blacksburg just doesn't make sense. Maybe before we moved here I would have thought that Koreans are roughly as violent as most other peoples. In that case, this tragedy would have been horrible and senseless, but not as wildly improbable as it does now. Koreans just don't do violence. Not in real life, anyway. (Most Korean males play violent online games, though.) This whole thing just doesn't make sense.

What hits us even more, though, is that for most people this story will be their only real contact with Koreans. They won't know Koreans as the honest, hard working, song-loving, honor-bound people that we know. No. They'll only know what they've been shown, which is an ultra-lonely, withdrawn, anti-social, violent, hateful, gun-toting maniac who calmly fills fellow human beings with lethal doses of lead before shooting himself in the heart. He's even thoughtful: he chained the escape doors closed beforehand to make his sick target practice easier.

I talked with many of my classes about this today. They all expressed shock, horror, disgust, and disbelief at the story. I made sure to pantomime the actions of the killer and the victims, to bring the lesson home. Then I explained to them that this sad event would be all the contact that most Americans would have with a Korean, and they seemed pretty upset. It's sort of like how I feel when I think about how most of what foreigners know about the U.S. is George W. Bush saying something fantastically stupid (like "Bring 'em on," a statement that basically challenged terrorists in Iraq to make our army's life a living hell, a challenge the terrorists have shown that they're more than up to), or the crap films that Hollywood puts out. "That's not America!" I want to scream. Several of my female friends have told me about how they were often groped when they went overseas, because most men in the countries they visited thought all American women were sluts who jumped into bed with men they'd just met, since that's how many women in popular U.S. movies are portrayed. "We're not like that!" my friends said.

My students said the same thing today. Unfortunately, two pistols and 63 casualties buy you a bigger stage to make your point with. All Koreans now have to live with a seriously disturbed kinsman who used his stage very badly.