Everybody's asking WHY?

[Dianne Day]

Of course everybody wants to know why Cho, the 23 year-old Korean student, shot and killed so many people at Virginia Tech (the school where my older son got his MFA, so I have some personal warm feelings for Blacksburg). Those who aren't asking Why are asking How can we prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future? The short answers are, We'll never know, and We can't. And that's true, but there are things we can know and things we can do.

I decided to blog about this because I have an interest that goes maybe deeper than is appropriate to post in response to the Forum questions and statements. I have some background, in that if a divorce hadn't interrupted my study for a PhD in clinical pschology, I probably would have become a practicing psychotherapist and eventually a Jungian anyalyst (that was a dream I didn't give up for a long time), and I would never have pursued my writing strongly enough to be published. Yet when you get right down to it, it's the observer in me, the part of me that's fascinated by human behavior, particularly odd or aberrant behavior, that wanted to be a psychologist and also wanted -- still wants -- to write the books. I did make it to the master's level in psych, and did an internship in child services at a county mental health center, and I continued to work in that same mental health center for another year as an adult therapist in the daycare program. I was there at the very time when all the state mental inpatient hospitals were being closed. The only reason I didn't continue was that I wasn't making enough money to support my two sons. I hope this personal information doesn't sound too referential or too much of a digression -- actually my experience is on point because I've been there -- when you get right down to it, the low salaries paid to mental health workers and teachers are in part a cause of many of the problems that have to be faced with dealing with the questions of How, if not Why..

OK, the Why: A young man who has a strong enough impulse to violence that he will shoot and kill 32 people and then himself did not get that way overnight, nor in the couple months immediately prior (when he bought the guns), nor during his few years at Virginia Tech. These disturbances start in childhood, always. A young man doesn't reach a point where he hands in a paper or signs into class using a question mark for his signature, without having had some very deep and scary stuff going on inside himself for a long time. It's not popular anymore to blame the parents, but the parents should have noticed durng the growing-up years that their son was not normal. They should have taken him for treatment. His teachers should have observed problems and told the parents. The school administration should have made counseling mandatory, a condition of his being allowed to remain in school. There are degrees and degrees of being "a weird kid", and weirdness should NOT be ignored. That weird kid is also not happy or comfortable within himself, and as a young human being he is entitled to feel such happiness and comfort. When I read, and heard, about Cho signing himself with a question mark, my heart went out to him -- and I was also chilled to the bone.

As to What to do so that this won't happen again: Sandra Ruttan wrote in her insightful blog on this subject that access to guns is not the real question. True, it's not. But it's an immediate question and not a total red herring, because you have to start somewhere. In my own blog [www.thecompassionatecurmudgeon.blogspot.com], before this "massacre" happened, I was writing about what I call "the Epidemic of Incivility" that we have going in this country right now. I don't know if the same sort of thing is all over Australia and England, Scotland, and Ireland, or not. I hope for their sakes not. The Don Imus thing is part of this. And at the most extreme end of the spectrum, I think this shooting is part of it too. We have to make it stop. If there is such a thing as a tipping point, we've reached it.

We writers have more power than we think we do. Crime novels are more popular than ever right now for a reason -- I really believe they're our way as a people, a whole society, of working out how to deal with the human tendency to be violent toward one another. That's a tendency we must outgrow, it's past time. If in our books we write solutions, I believe we can help the solutions to come. We can't give up and say "That's just the way it is."

The way you impact individuals who have mental problems that may lead them ultimately to commit violent acts is three-fold: identification, intervention, and supportive counseling. Not incarceration. You don't put mentally/emotionally ill people in jail and think you've solved your problems as a society. It doesn't work that way, and that's the one single biggest mistake being made in the US at this time. A child who is having problems relating to other children, his parents, and even to animals; a teenager who is "a weird kid" and an adamant loner -- they need to be talked to, and tested, and treated, by professional people who are trained to know when they're falling into dangerous territory. Professional support, and parental support, has to be consistent and persistent in order for it to have a chance to work. This assumes that such professionals exist and are well trained and are paid enough that they don't burn out and their caseloads are small enough, ditto. Parents need to be at least as concerned with what is going on inside their children's heads as they are with making enough money to live whatever lifestyle they've chosen. It should not be acceptable to let kids do a lot of the things they do today -- healthy children need to know where the boundaries are.Hell, they need to know that boundaries even exist. And I guess it's necessary, first, for the parents to have some boundaries themselves.

It's just not possible for me to say everything I want to say -- I feel my head is breaking. I care, I really, deeply care.

[Harley L. Sachs]

As a retired professor I applaud the teacher who sounded the alarm over what the shooter wrote in class. Occasionally a teacher is able to spot a serious problem that is outside the realm of the course subjecgt matter. I discovered one of my students, though bright, had a medical problem. Turned out to be a thyroid issue that once treated freed him from his apparant lethargy. Sometimes a student's dislexia turns up in an English paper, oddly misspelled words, that was not previously diagnosed. I had only one really creepy student in twenty years which other faculty agreed might be a problem, but it never got beyond us to the dean of students. I did have one student who was epileptic and I tried to get him in a car pool so he woulnd't commute alone. Our options are limited, but a teacher does have a possibility of intervention. It's a delicate matter, for we are not psychologists and sometimes we just don't want to get too close to someone who is weird and might be dangerous.