Let's Not Rush to Judgment

April 18, 2007 4:51 PM

his may seem like a strange sentiment coming from me; I'm not exactly regarded as someone who waits until all the information is in before making a carefuly, deliberate judgment. Still, the tragic events at Virginia Tech have forced me to conclude that we have to wait before we make the various judgments we're going to make.

First, I think it's important that we remember that not every lonely, depressed, isolated, or shy person is going to become a murderer. From what I've read, Cho Seung-Hui's behavior was bizarre, dramatic, and perhaps calculated. Unfortunately, in his case, this behavior indicated the potential for almost unbelievable cruelty. But we should remember, as we interact with our coworkers and classmates, that behavior like Mr. Cho's, in the vast majority of instances, suggests only social awkwardness, not homicidal rage. We shouldn't start assuming that people who are withdrawn or quiet are just biding their time. To do so would be to give into unfounded paranoia.

Second, we shouldn't cast judgment on Mr. Cho's teachers or family. The plays he wrote, which are now posted online (I won't link to them--I think it's strange that they ended up being available in the first place--but you can find them through Google, probably), aside from being terribly written, involve molestation and murder. Having never been a university professor, I have no idea what the appropriate response to those kinds of writings would be. On the one hand, writing is a method of expressing what someone might not otherwise be able to express. So worrying that Mr. Cho's plays demonstrated a very real danger, either to himself or others, seems reasonable. On the other hand, however, many people, from William Shakespear to the writers of the movie Saw, have written about death, tragedy, and murder without being killers themselves. It appears, then, that Mr. Cho's teachers were in a pretty terrible situation. I don't know if I would have reacted the same way they did, but, based on what we know now, it looks as though they did their best to ensure everyone's safety while trying to help Mr. Cho.

Mr. Cho's parents, immigrants from South Korea, may also be subject to premature judgment. Both of Mr. Cho's plays focus on a character that has been molested. It's easy to assume that Mr. Cho was molested himself. Once that leap has been made, the subsequent assumption that his parents were responsible seems justified. But Mr. Cho's parents have remained silent, to my knowledge, and understandably so: not only do they have to deal with the death of their only son, they have to deal with the fact that the entire world now considers him a monster. Surely, they're second guessing every decision they ever made--I can't imagine what that would be like. I can say, however, that we shouldn't blame them for what happened based on what little information we have. Perhaps the Chos were horrible parents that abused and mistreated their son, but we shouldn't assume that to be the case.

Finally, we should probably keep an open mind about the Virginia Tech administrators. I know that if my child was a student there, I'd want answers about why the school was not put on lock down after a fatal on-campus shooting. I'd want to know why classes were still held that morning. I'd want to know why school officials believed that the shooting was an isolated incident. And I'd want to know why more of an effort wasn't made to inform the student body. I think the adminstrators have a lot of hard questions to answer, and I don't personally think they'll be able to address them in a satisfactory manner. But I could very easily be proven wrong, so we shouldn't blame them just yet.

As countless others have remarked, it is part of human nature to attempt to bring some order to a seemingly chaotic situation. That instinct is amplified when the chaotic situation is, like the Virginia Tech shooting has been, traumatic and seemingly preventable. A consequence of our order-imposing nature is to assign blame. In the case of this incident, though, there's only one person we can definitively blame: Cho Seung-Hui. Whatever problems Mr. Cho had, whatever abuse he endured (if he endured any at all), whatever lead him to make the choices he made Monday morning, he is responsible for those choices. Other people and institutions may have inadvertently facilitated Mr. Cho's actions, but he's the only person we know was directly responsible. In the coming days and weeks, our attention will rightly turn to how we can prevent this from happening again. We should be sure, however, that in our rush to ensure safety for ourselves and our campuses, we don't condemn those that don't deserve condemnation.

2 Comments

anon said:

I'm just biding my time.

April 18, 2007 6:42 PM

TheExpat said:

I second your call for patience. As a critical reader of your blog, I will likewise withhold judgement on your withholding of judgement until judgement has been sufficiently withheld.

Sorry, that will likely be taken as being in poor taste, but we gotta lighten the mood a little here, before the flood of vitriol infects this blog.

April 19, 2007 6:41 AM

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