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Thursday, April 19th, 2007 While we spent the last two weeks railing at each other about racial insults, sexist jokes, hip hop music, apologies that won't fly, and weighty matters related to the First Amendment, a deranged college student sat plotting the mass murder of his classmates along with his own suicide on the idyllic campus of Virginia Tech. Now that the fog of horror is beginning to lift everyone is scrambling to find someone to point a finger at. Last week rap music was to blame for the arsenal of racist and sexist insults that are at the disposal of shock jocks like Don Imus. This week the NRA and Hollywood are to blame. The NRA, says the Left, makes it possible for mentally sick young men like Cho Seung-Hui to get his hands on an arsenal of weapons to act out their private fantasies of murder and suicide. At the same time, says the Right, Hollywood is to blame for churning out an arsenal of violent movies like Quentin Tarantino "Grindhouse" that feed our appetite for carnage and violence. Nothing like hateful speech and violent rampages to keep things in perspective. If we're going to blame NRA, Hollywood, or even video games we all have some blame to shoulder. Lord knows, ours is culture that is fascinated with violence. I am as liable as the next person for indulging in the guilty pleasurable pasttime of watching crime dramas on television every week (e.g., Law and Order, CSI, Cold Case). I don't know when it happened. Recant: I do know. But that's another story. What I also know is that figuring out the motivation behind the murder is half the" fun" of watching the crime show. But the rampage at Virginia Tech is a sobering wake up call, or it should be. It doesn't matter what "motivated" the gunman behind the Virginia Tech shooting. I won't join the media detectives in pouring over the identity of the killer's family and the putative ethnic nature of his rage, nor do I care to watch as journalists shove a microphone in the face of every person who ever bumped up against him in the hallway or try reconstructing what he had for breakfast the morning of his rampage. Besides, we haven't bothered to do the same type of psychological and cultural analysis upon those who four years ago committed our youth to the bloodbath and carnage reported weekly out of Iraq. Enough. Stop the violence by keeping up the protest against pro-gun lobbyists and by boycotting movies that showcase gratuitous violence. Better time is spent praying for the tortured souls that commit these acts of violence. Stop the violence by turning it off in ourselves. After tragedies like the one this week, says one Virginia Tech student who also survived the Columbine massacre of ten years ago this week, normalcy never returns. After a steady diet of violence all these years, can any of us say what normal — or decency and civility, for that matter — is anymore? -- Original Source: Something Within by Rev. Dr. Renita J. Weems http://www.somethingwithin.com/blog/?cat=73 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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The Virginia Tech Shootings: A Case for Redundant Communications
By Fred Burton Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 Campus police at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Va., on April 17 identified the perpetrator of the shooting rampage on campus a day earlier as South Korean English student Cho Seung Hui. Thirty-three people died as a result of the attack and several others were injured, some seriously. The shooting began about 7:15 a.m. on the fourth floor of co-ed dormitory West Ambler Johnston Hall. According to reports, Cho shot and killed his girlfriend and then a resident assistant who responded to the sound of the shots. Police were investigating those shootings when Cho stormed Norris Hall, a classroom building some half a mile away, and opened fire on faculty and students, killing another 30 people. The rampage ended when Cho killed himself. Authorities have not released many of the details of the attack, though several important points can be ascertained from the known facts. Given the history of school and university shootings in the United States, the certainty that others will occur and the warning from the FBI about a possible Beslan-style militant attack, the lessons from the Virginia Tech attack can be instructive - perhaps even lifesaving. Methodical Planning First, the shooting was planned in advance and methodically executed. This conclusion is supported by the fact that Cho carried two pistols and loads of ammunition, that he went directly to another building for the second phase of the attack and that he used chains to secure the main doors to Norris Hall before opening fire. The chains served to keep targets inside the building and to impede the entry of responding law enforcement officers. Cho had studied the building and planned accordingly. Although criticism has begun over the level of security at Norris Hall, and Virginia Tech in general, attacks of this nature cannot be prevented by security devices and programs. Educational institutions, especially sprawling universities, are soft targets that cannot be hermetically sealed like a federal penitentiary. As such, prison-style security measures would be not only impractical, stifling and prohibitively expensive, but also ultimately ineffective — because even tight security cannot stop a determined, suicidal attacker. On campuses, even the best physical security measures — closed-circuit television coverage, metal detectors, identification badges, locks and so forth — have finite utility. These measures serve a valuable purpose, but they cannot stand alone. For one thing, the technology cannot evaluate and react. Also, it can be observed, learned and even fooled. Moreover, because some systems frequently produce false alarms, warnings in real danger situations can be brushed aside. Given these shortcomings, it is quite possible for anyone planning an act of violence to map out, quantify and then defeat or bypass physical security devices. In fact, security devices can be relied on too much, resulting in a false sense of security. History shows us that even adding guards into the mix is not enough to prevent attacks. The March 2005 shooting in Red Lake, Minn., demonstrates that even strict access-control measures, such as ID badges, metal detectors and security guards, can be circumvented -or neutralized. In Red Lake, the security guard was the first person killed. Indicators of Planning In past cases, school shooters often have given prior warnings as to their intentions. In other words, they did not just "snap" and go on a killing spree. In most cases, their attacks were methodically planned, often over a long period of time. Jeff Weise, the teenage student arrested for the Minnesota shootings, allegedly spent more than a year planning his attack, including conducting walk-through rehearsals and noting the location of security cameras. Weise also had help from a friend, who eventually pleaded guilty to transmitting threatening messages via the Internet. As in workplace attacks, one of the biggest contributing factors to school shootings is the failure to identify the warning signs or to take the signs (even obvious ones) seriously. Because of this, following the April 1999 Columbine shooting, the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Secret Service conducted an extensive study of school shootings and developed educational materials that have helped raise the awareness of such warning signs. The warning signs include sudden changes in a person's behavior, his or her decreased productivity, withdrawal from friends or the sudden display of negative traits, such as irritation, poor hygiene or snapping at or abusing fellow students. Perhaps the most indicative signs that serious trouble is looming are talk about suicide and/or the expression of actual or veiled threats. In most previous cases, especially those involving detailed planning, the factors leading to the violent outburst have built up over a long time. These factors have included failed romantic relationships, stress from family relationships, failing grades or perceived injustice at the hands of peers or teachers. As was highlighted in the Columbine case, quite often the shooter fantasizes about committing the attack for some time and even shares those fantasies with a friend or via an online form such as a blog or Web site. Due to the government's educational efforts, several attacks have been foiled by people who have recognized and reported the warning signs to authorities. Of course in some cases, the signs have been as blatant as students sharing their plans for an attack in advance with their friends or warning other students not to go to school on a certain day. Although the details of the events leading up to the Virginia Tech shooting are not yet clear, Cho apparently spent quite some time planning his attack, which strongly suggests he gave some indication of his intent that was not recognized or that he even made threats that went unheeded. There are now unconfirmed reports that Cho set at least one fire on campus, that he had stalked a student, that he had been sent for counseling and that he was taking an antidepressant. At least some of these indicators likely are true, and we anticipate that others will surface as the investigation into the attack progress. Warning Systems Some of the most critical comments about the Virginia Tech administration have centered on the long delay in notifying the faculty and student body that a shooter was at large, that the eventual warning was not transmitted to all and that it was confusing to those who did receive it. One source at Virginia Tech said many people received no warning and that communication of the event was "very much a case of who had cell phone or wireless devices before the system was overloaded and crashed." In some university buildings, such as the library, the public address system is not used to convey emergency instructions. The source said the result was that large clusters of students "seemed to be caught between orders to go inside and some sort of building evacuation instructions," and thus remained outside. This confusion was cleared up once police began using the PA systems on their vehicles to convey clear instructions to the students. So perhaps one of the biggest lessons from this attack will be the need for large institutions to have redundant and overlapping notification systems that will convey clear and consistent instructions. Such systems could incorporate e-mail notification, text messages and public address systems. Of course any such system would have to be routinely tested and refined to become more effective. Contingency Planning Historically, incidents of school shootings tend to spawn similar attacks so that three or four major incidents occur within a few weeks of one another. Given that precedent, the FBI's current concerns over a mass attack against a school, and the April 20 anniversary of the Columbine attack (which also is Adolf Hitler's birthday), it would be prudent for university security directors, local school boards, parents and students to review or establish emergency plans. Like 9/11, the massive 2003 U.S. power outage and Hurricane Katrina, the confusion evidenced in Blacksburg highlights the need for contingency plans in the event of an accident, natural disaster or attack by criminals or militants. Such plans are important not only for corporations and schools, but also for families and individuals. Furthermore, there should be a plan for each regular location — home, work and school — that outlines what each person will do and where they will go should they be forced to evacuate. This means establishing meeting points for family members who might be split up — and backup points in case the first one also is affected by the disaster. When such incidents occur, the ensuing chaos often results in difficulty communicating, as cell phone and regular phone circuits become overwhelmed with traffic. The lack of ability to communicate with loved ones can greatly enhance the panic felt during a crisis. Perhaps the most value derived from having a personal and family contingency plan is a reduction in the amount of stress that results from not being able to immediately contact a loved one. Knowing that everyone is following the plan — and that contact eventually will be established — frees each person to concentrate on the more pressing issue of evacuation. Because of this, communication is an important part of any such plan, and redundant forms of communication must be established in advance. Past crises such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina have shown that even if cell phone and regular phone circuits are jammed, text messages and e-mail frequently will continue to work. This means that every member of the family, including technophobes, must learn to use text messaging and e-mail. While no emergency plan can account for every eventuality, such plans do provide a framework from which to work, even during times of panic. The open nature of schools and universities makes preventing attacks on campuses extremely difficult — though a student body, faculty and staff that know the warning signs can be a vital line of defense. Once an attack begins, proper communications and well-designed contingency plans can minimize the casualty count. Distribution and Reprints This report may be distributed or republished with attribution to Strategic Forecasting, Inc. at www.stratfor.com. For media requests, partnership opportunities, or commercial distribution or republication, please contact pr@stratfor.com. -- Original Source: http://crackerboy.us/emergency-preparedness-checklist/virginia-tech-shootings/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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Sometimes I can be really eloquent. Giving a toast at a wedding, a briefing at work; I can really hit the post. I've been wanting to write about how I feel here for two days. But I haven't, stopped by disbelief, the taxes I couldn't bring myself to finish on Monday, and the belief that I wouldn't adequately be able to put together words to explain what Blacksburg and Tech have meant to me. That picture, http://farm1.static.flickr.com/5/6929893_3276db6dfb_m.jpg, is of a couple of my old room mates Jeff (in glasses) and Donnie tailgating at the Tech - USC game in August of 2004. I graduated from Virginia Tech in 1986, with a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies. 20 plus years later, we are still close friends. Probably closer than we were in school. We vacation together, are godparents to each others kids, and watch football obviously. Blacksburg is a special place. When you're there, you might not realize how special. It's beautiful, peaceful and even knows how to have a good time. I have idyllic (and therefore heavily filtered) memories of my time at school. I think that's why all of my old room mates and I are still such good friends. When you leave Blacksburg, you realize that the real world isn't so beatiful, isn't so peaceful, isn't so special. And you reach out and hold on to whatever can give you a little of that Blacksburg feeling again. After 20 years you'll still see most of the alumni I know dressed pretty much like the kids you've been watching on TV this week. Virginia Tech Sweatshirts and Hats are ubiguitous. Returning to Blacksburg, was to drink in that atmosphere, to rejuvenate the energy that the real world has sapped from you. Coming around the 460 bypass and seeing the mountains rise up beyond campus elated me. A burger at Mike's, a pitcher at Hokie House, a walk across campus returned me to the man of my youth. And now that bastard has let so much of the real world into Blacksburg, where it doesn't belong and isn't welcome. It's amazing the lasting ties that we have to Tech. One old college friend is an agronomy professor there now. I spent Monday morning exchanging emails with him as he was locked in his office. Today I can't help but think about all the students that I met at his tailgate last Fall. Jeff, I'm sure, knew Dr. Librescu. Three or four of the victims so far have been international studies majors. The statistical improbability of that I can't explain. I graduated in a class of 6,000 with only 12 other international studies majors. Soon the news vans will leave, hopefully the TV movie vans won't come right behind them, and we can all hope that the ugliness of the real world ebbs back out of town. God bless the victims, the heroes, the students, everyone. Ut Prosim. posted by Paulie @ 07:02 April 18, 2007 Permalink: http://paultrumble.blogspot.com/2007/04/where-do-we-go-now-sometimes-i-can-be.html
Sometimes I'm just amazed at the ignorance of people. I've come across many blog entries that are outright idiotic but usually chalk it up to 'that's where they're coming from' or 'everyone's entitled to their opinion'. However, some Erie bloggers recently have been spewing forth complete garbage that needs to be addressed. The gist is this: those students killed at Virginia Tech were partly to blame for their death by not fighting back. Underlying this is the premise that American's have been lulled into submission and taught not to self-defend. I reject this in all of its absurdity and callousness. I was absolutely furious this morning after reading these two Erie bloggers, Sassafrassin and Kodera, for their statements. To try and disguise their comments as intellectual or serious commentary would be disingenuous. Flat out, they are out of line and need to be called out on their statements and insinuations. Disregarding the fact that no one really knows what was going on in the minds of those who were murdered, but to turn around and somehow place the blame on them is reprehensible. It's disgusting. It's obscene. Although part of me realizes that what is going on here are people trying to understand and give meaning to what is completely senseless and without explanation, these kinds of statements reveal underlying problems of our society. Not only does it reveal a deeper violent tendency, but a lack of ability for compassion and understanding--both of which are essential to Peace in this world. To these two bloggers, who seem to be professedly conservative (and at least one has expressed he is Christian), Jesus Christ would be considered a liberal pansy for allowing himself to be executed and for making the statement, "If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also." Instead we're all expected to be like warriors in some Hollywood flick, living up to superficial ideals. You know, part of my response and anger to these two bloggers has to do with the fact that I'm confused and angry about what happened as well. But I hope that I have enough sense to step back and to see the humanity of it all but more importantly God in all of this. While working out at the gym, I was randomly watching the overhead television sets when a particular segment on Good Morning America caught my eye. A young woman who almost found herself killed and even lost a friend in the massacre said this: "I lost, I lost a friend. I lost one of the girls in my Bible study. And I know, I know, I know that she's already forgiven him. I know she was probably praying for him when he was in her classroom and when he was shooting people." I was shocked when I saw that she said this and also said herself that she wants to forgive as well. Instead of placing blame or expressing hatred, this young woman has a sense clarity and perspective that those of us could only hope to have. Also, if you watch the video of her accounting of what happened, I think you'll see how ridiculous these two bloggers suggestions are. We should be trying to do more good in this world, not talk about how if we would be in the situation of those students at Virginia Tech how we would beat our chest and smash someone's skull in. Violence begets violence and this kind of discourse only sustains the miserable status quo. Instead of trying to blame one another, we should be supporting each other through prayer and solace. Here's something you can do if you're feeling helpless after this tragic event: do something nice for a complete stranger this week if the opportunity arises--hold the door longer than you normally would, resist flipping off that driver who cut you off, or buy that homeless guy a cup of coffee or a sandwich. Your act doesn't have to raise to the level of heroic--just human. It's all that we can expect of each other. Posted by RichardZ.com on April 19, 2007 11:46 AM | Permalink -- Original Source: RichardZ.com http://richardz.com/blog_archive/2007/04/virginia_tech_massacrefinding_peace.php Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.
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Status Anxiety Pt. 2: How Did We Get Here...How Do We Get Out
Yesterday we talked about Status Anxiety and how it related to the Virginia Tech shootings. Today we continue talking about it and focus in on Alain de Button's book by the same title Status Anxiety. Part of understanding Status anxiety is viewing the transition from status that was given by heredity to a system where people who don't earn status are seen as failures. The example used in Alain de Button's book is that of Christianity the major religion of western societies and the one that the VT shooter ranted about in the infamous videos sent to NBC. The gospels have three stories that Jesus told during his life time that provide an example of how people were viewed. The first story is summarized as, "The poor are not responsible for their condition and are the most useful in society." The second story says, "Low status has no moral connotations," and the final story says, "The rich are sinful and corrupt and owe their wealth to their robbery of the poor," aka, "It is harder for a rich man to enter heaven than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle." Now contrast those with the stories that have emerged in our western societies. The first of these says, "The rich are the useful ones, not the poor." The second says, "One's status does have moral connotations," and the final alteration to the stories surmises that, "The poor are sinful and corrupt and owe their poverty to their stupidity." This is a form of meritocracy. In this system, "all persons, however humble, know they have had every chance...If they have been labeled dunce repeatedly they cannot any longer pretend...Are they not bound to recognize that they have an inferior status, not as in the past because they were denied opportunity, but because they ARE inferior." All of this plays into the recent shootings because something of this magnitude generates questions that demand answers. Questions like, how could this have be prevented? What causes people to act out in such a violent fashion? Is there anything that we can do to prevent these types of incidents in the future? The shooter at Virginia Tech really doesn't stand out from other recent school shootings because in each case the shooters had similar personalities. Whether we are thinking of the killers from Columbine or the most recent shooting at Virginia Tech the common thread is people who are unhappy about their status in life. So how do we stop this from happening again? How do we beat this. Alain de Botton shares some suggestions that have worked in the past and continue to work in various degrees. He lists these as philosophy, intelligent misanthropy, art, Christianity, and finally bohemia. The book goes into great detail on each of these solutions, but the common theme is that they help people find value in their lives despite what those around them might be saying or despite what society at large is pushing upon them. John Ruskin is quoted in Button's book and in my estimation does a good job summing up the problem and the solution. He says, "There is not wealth but life, life including all its powers of love, of joy and of admiration. That country is richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the function of his own life to the utmost." My hope is that the few people that read this stop comparing themselves to everyone else and start living their lives. John Lennon famously said, "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans. " Could this be translated as 'life is what happens when we're comparing ourselves to others?' I know I too have experienced this reality. The hope is that in the future we will learn to recognize more situations that are happening right here right now. Personally I would be fine with becoming successful or popular or even having money. In fact I think status anxiety in moderation is a good thing. I just don't want you and I to HAVE to get rich, famous, or powerful to view our lives as a success. I'm sure that the VT shooter was a disturbed person and might have needed hospitalization, medication, and more but there are other people out there right now who just want to be recognized for the person they are . Can't we do more of this? I for one am going to try. Posted on Thursday, May 3, 2007 at 12:29AM AJ Meyer -- Original Source: http://www.hiphoosier.com/the-beat/2007/5/3/status-anxiety-pt-2-how-did-we-get-herehow-do-we-get-out.html Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5.
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Status Anxiety and What Happened at Virginia Tech Pt. 1
By now the mass media has inundated you with coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre, but I don't want to rehash the details of the event. I want to take a deeper look at a possible motive. Some people will argue about gun control, or the failure of the mental health community. While these are salient issues they miss what I gathered from the videos to be an overarching reason behind his rampage. He like many school gunman before him felt inferior to his peers. He turned this "status anxiety" inward until it manifested in a maniacal rampage. Status Anxiety, I'm pretty sure that the people living in Rublyovo know all about it. From what I've heard Los Angeles is right up there too (I'll let you know this summer). Increasingly and unexpectedly another type of high status local has begun to emerge in previously quite towns like Bloomington, IN. That's right, university towns are working hard to be included in the same breathe as other high status locals. It used to be that college was a time when people ate ramen and being "poor" was rite of passage. Not anymore. I'm sure that some students still have a tough time at college, but increasingly the term poor college kid is a joke. Youth and excess money make these towns the perfect starting place for status anxiety. Before we go on lets give a quick explanation of status anxiety before I am labeled a communist and you quit reading. The basis of the problem can be summed up by William James's simple equation Self Esteem = Success Expectations The problem is that in our modern society expectations continue to rise at rates that are unattainable for most people. This creates a rise in levels of status anxiety which translates into a rise in levels of concern about importance, achievement, and income. What happens then is that self-esteem suffers. People feel anxious about their lives. They feel that life is not amounting to what they expected. In the worst case scenarios like the one at Virginia Tech people take out their frustrations on others who they perceive as having the success they so desire. One University of Kentucky student put it this way "I think the biggest pressure would probably be social. Being at the right bars or parties on the weekend and then for girls the right fashion, outside the sorority I guess it would probably be the same." These feelings are all part of a trend that has been going on for some time now. One author Alain de Botton in his book titled Status Anxiety identifies the ignominious nature of this problem. He notes that the sharp decline in actual deprivation found in many western societies paradoxically increases the sense of deprivation and fear of it. Even in America a nation blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond those imaginable to our ancestors we continue to believe that nothing is ever enough. Now you might being say to yourself I have no desire to be Donald Trump, but what if one of your closest friends got rich. Take for example this weeks episode of the HBO uberstatus series Entourage. In the episode Ari (rich Hollywood agent) has an old friend come for a visit. He believes that his old frat buddy is managing a Hooters somewhere back east. When he finds out that he made 65 million dollars from stamps.com and got a beautiful young fiance he gets jealous. Botton makes note of this psychological phenomenon that sees us comparing ourselves mostly to our closest friends our "reference group". It is their relative successes that creates the most status anxiety. In Part 2 tomorrow we look more closely a Bottons reasons for how we got here and how we can break free from our status anxiety. Pt. 2 Tomorrow (Click Here) Posted on Wednesday, May 2, 2007 at 12:26AM by AJ Meyer -- Original Source: http://www.hiphoosier.com/the-beat/2007/5/2/status-anxiety-and-what-happened-at-virginia-tech-pt-1.html Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5.
By Keith Boykin, in politics Tuesday, April 17 2007, 10:24AM The news was gruesome and alarming. Reuters reported that at least 30 people were shot yesterday in a deadly gun rampage that rocked a city once known for its safety and scholarship. By now, you've heard about the story, and many of us have already stopped paying attention. But I'm not talking about the deadly school shooting in Virginia Monday morning. I'm talking about the deadly violence in Iraq that goes on everyday. While most of the world was understandably horrified by the campus shooting at Virginia Tech yesterday, almost no one paid attention to the 30 people who were shot and killed in Baghdad on the same day. The shock and horror of watching such dramatic violence in Virginia immediately resonated with Americans. But here's something else to ponder. What if it happened every day? What if we saw that kind of carnage in our communities every night on the evening news? It sounds far-fetched, but that's exactly the situation that faces many Iraqis almost every day of the year. If the shooting in Virginia tells us anything about human society, it should tell us that violence is far too common in the world. It's not just an American problem or an Iraqi problem, it is a global problem. What kind of world do we live in where young students have virtually unfettered access to sophisticated deadly weapons that can be used to kill their classmates and teachers? And how did we become desensitized to the tens of thousands of civilian casulaties in a war we're still fighting in Baghdad? I don't think it is possible to stop every murder or every killing that takes place in this country or abroad, but I do believe we have a responsibility to promote the conditions for peace. For all the talk about our Christian values in America, we are an extraordinarily violent society. The FBI reported 1.4 million violent crimes in the U.S. in 2005 and more than 16,000 murders. That's a drop from the record high figures in the early 1990s but it shows that we are still far too violent. Through elective wars, capital punishment, gang violence, and media depictions of violence, we demonstrate our collective societal preference for violence as a solution to our problems. I don't know what motivated the young student in Virginia to shoot up his classmates, and I don't know what motivates the suicide bombers in Iraq to blow up their neighbors. But I do know that we have a duty to promote peace in this country and abroad. Imagine the impact that could be made if America lead an international campaign for peace instead of a war on terror. Imagine the goodwill we could generate if we diverted some of the $500 billion we've spent on war in recent years so that we could build hospitals, schools, and housing throughout the undeveloped world. Imagine the difference it might make if our leaders dropped some of the macho rhetoric and talked about service, duty and community responsibility? I know there will be much discussion in the next few days about gun control and mental health counseling and legislation, and I welcome that conversation. But we should also ask ourselves about the world we've created and what each of us can do to make it better and more peaceful. The Virginia shooting was shocking, in part, because it was so unusual. Unlike the Iraqis, we're not accustomed to seeing such large-scale violence on a regular basis. Or, more precisely, we're not accustomed to seeing it here in the United States, because clearly we know it's happening in Iraq. But what if it happened here everyday? That might be the tragic catalyst that would finally inspire us to do something positive and constructive about the violence in our country and the rest of the world. It would be tempting to point to the shooter in Blacksburg and isolate him as the problem. But the problem and the solution don't lie outside of us. They answers are within. -- Original Source: keithboykin.com http://www.keithboykin.com/arch/2007/04/17/what_if_it_happ Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0.
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Wednesday, April 18, 2007 A nutcase shot 32 people and himself in Virginia tech. He was a loner, was obsessed with violence, and left some notes blaming "rich kids" and "debauchery" (that is, disapproved of other people having more money and getting laid more often than himself - which is a rather common human emotion, but most people don't go postal because of it). The university is being blamed for not acting fast enough on the day of the shooting. I don't know if they should be blamed for it - I am sure an investigation will find out, one way or another - but what I would like to know is how come the university did not do anything after the guy harassed a few women and set fire to the dorm. (Maybe there is some good answer to that, too.) The man has also written two plays that the readers found very violent and highly disturbing. Here they are. I have read them and have not found them particularly violent or disturbing: they are rather violent, but I and people I know have written worse without shooting anyone, and they are quite angry in a teenagery way, but nothing really out of ordinary. They would not have rung a warning bell with me. I wonder if that's just me being desensitized to violence, or the people did not really see anything scary about them earlier and are just having a flash of hindsight now, or do the creative writing teachers and students see warnings much more efficiently than ordinary people like myself. There was a lot of conversation of gun control after this. I have no strong opinion on gun control one way or the other, at least as long as it does not interfere with my pistol shooting hobby (and currently in Finland it doesn't), but after seeing several people in the US point out that the gunman could have been stopped earlier if any of the students or teachers had a gun on them, and several of my friends on IRC make fun of this argument, I must say that those people in the US really do have a point: I don't, generally speaking, believe that an armed society is a polite society. It's a tradeoff: on one hand, if you outlaw guns only outlaws will have them, on the other hand it might well be safer when only the serious outlaws have guns than when every teenage hooligan has them. However, if we already are in a state where people are allowed to buy and carry firearms freely, banning guns from a small area like a university campus really will lead to a situation where everyone who is up to no good can have a gun, and no law-abiding citizen will. The worst of both worlds. Posted by Vera at 4/18/2007 12:40:00 PM -- Original Source: Vera's log http://izrailit.blogspot.com/2007/04/virginia-tech-shooting.html This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.
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Guns Don't Kill People, Kids Who Play Video Games Kill People...
April 18, 2007 I apologize in advance for the tone of this piece. I thoroughly appreciate the devastating gravity of the situation, and I extend my heartfelt condolences to those families and friends affected. Blacksburg, Virginia. Less than a week ago, nothing would have sprung to mind. In fact, many would not even have known this small town existed. Now, for obvious reasons, it's on the map. The events of April 16 serve as a reminder - a reminder that society is imperfect; that society is unpredictable; and that society is unprepared. In fairness to those involved, the events at Virgina Tech could not have been predicted with any ease. What happened was not a commonplace, run-of-the-mill, every-day happening. I won't even go so far as to say that what happened could have been prevented - there is no reasonable way of knowing that. What I will do, however, is take a few quick shots at the aftermath. Everyone has their own concocted theory on how to respond to this type of situation. Pat Brown, for example, argues that whoever was the owner of the weapons used in the attack should be held accountable for the deaths of each and every student and professor on Monday. She believes that somehow, this would prevent a psychopath from acquiring the weapons they would choose to employ for such causes. The real world begs to differ, Pat. What we need to take away from the Virginia Tech Massacre is very simple - there are people out there that need help. Guns didn't kill those students; the Asian man didn't kill those professors; what transpired at Virginia Tech is exactly what happened at Columbine, Taber, Montreal, and every other mass shooting. These people were neglected. Do I believe in any way that whatever circumstances the shooter may have been put through justify his actions? No. Reciprocity, particularly when it involves violence, solves nothing. With that said, however, how do we take ownership of Monday's events? Do we pretend that this was an isolated incident - a single student lashing out at random? Did this man wake up on the wrong side of the bed, and decide that morning to take the lives of 32 innocent people? I don't think so. Society perpetuates the attitude and the atmosphere that leads these people to commit horrendous acts. If this young man had been cared for, appreciated, respected, and amongst friends, would there still be 32 innocent people dead? Would the thought ever have even crossed his mind that he could be capable of such an atrocity? These murderers are not the product of their own tendencies - they are products of society, as are we all. Maybe they needed medical attention, or maybe they had deep-rooted psychological issues; that could absolutely be a contributing factor. At the end of the day, however, someone pushed this young man over the edge, and was repaid in the most horrific kind. DO NOT fool yourself into believing that we are not responsible for what happened. Each and every one of us, through our thoughts, words, or actions, could spur or prevent the next Virginia Tech. We point fingers at the school's administration, the local police, the county flower... ultimately, we must all hold ourselves and one-another accountable for the citizens we are. Blacksburg, you have our thoughts and prayers. If nothing else, remember: This too shall pass. In mourning, this is BSPM, signing off. Posted by keh619 on April 18, 2007 05:08 PM -- Original Source: http://blogs.usask.ca/politics/2007/04/guns_dont_kill.html Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0.
keh619 / Tales of a Back Seat Prime Minster (blog)
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Some Analysis of the Killings at Virginia Tech
April 17th, 2007 As a part of my Homicide Investigation class at George Washington University, my instructor has asked us to write a brief analysis of the killings that occurred at Virginia Tech on Monday. Even though I am only a student and haven't had the experience, statistically speaking, there are many things that are common when this type of crime occurs. I am in no way stating that any of the following is fact, it is just my interpretation of the events as based on my knowledge gained in my Homicide Investigation course. * * * It appears that the offender's motivation for the first shooting is domestic. There have been much speculation as to the offender's relationship with the female victim. Some feel that they may have been in a relationship or that Cho had feelings for the female victim. It is possible that his motivation to kill her was caused by Cho's apparent hatred for "spoiled, rich kids." Is it possible that Cho had feelings for the female and was rejected? Thus taking his hatred out on her? Based on the fact that Cho walked across campus (at least half a mile) to Norris Hall to commit his crimes shows he had been planning this. The killings at Norris were not spontaneous at all. Cho wanted to destroy what symbolized the high class that he felt such disdain for. Since he associated many, if not all, students at Virginia Tech as being in this class, he felt that everyone encountered could potentially be his victims. This murder seems most likely to be an authority murder. The perceived authority being the higher class. If Cho grew up in a middle or lower income family, then this could explain his problem with the higher class. Northern Virginia can have very large gaps in the income levels among families. Cho probably felt this gap during his time in school in Northern Virginia and this is what probably helped escalate his hatred. But the question remains of who was his primary target? Was it the first two victims? Or was his primary target someone in Norris Hall? Usually in an authority killing, the killing ends once the primary target is killed. Did Cho find his primary target in Norris Hall, then end his life? Weapon stockpiling and verbalization of hatred towards a particular authority is also common in this type of murder. It seems that Cho did both of these things by purchasing two semiautomatic handguns and writing disturbing poetry and plays in his creative writing classes. Cho probably had a history of mental illness, including isolation, paranoid behavior, etc. Cho's post offensive behavior did not seem to change at all. Especially since he shot two people, and calmly went back to his own dorm, then walked across campus to execute another batch of killings. Cho's history of being isolated and calm continues to his post-offensive behavior. This is probably why nothing was suspected of his behavior in between the two shooting incidents. -- Original Source: fallenposters / Do Not Cross (Blog) http://fallenposters.wordpress.com/2007/04/17/some-analysis-of-the-killings-at-virginia-tech/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
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April 19, 2007 UPDATE: Thanks for the various thoughtful comments, thoughtful commenters - I'm sure you know who you are. First off, I do acknowledge that I was a little snarky and "aha!" in the initial reaction to things, and I agree that it just puts people in a bad mood. But, I could have easily erased what I said, and not because I think it was wrong to have the thought, but because it distracted so much from the majority of the stuff I was really trying to say. Yet, I would somehow feel it dishonest to do so, and the reason I write is to organize my thoughts and logic for people to see; I just wish people in general, and not just over the past few days, could read this blog as one man's thoughts in motion, as opposed my final thoughts on matters. I have strong opinions, but those thoughts wend and weave according to other good opinions. That said, I also know I write a lot. Loooong posts. Opinionated posts. Wordy posts. And that's off-putting as well. I know that, but it would take me forever to get this stuff out if I had to condense it down, distill it, make it simpler. And since the vast majority of blogs out there write in short form, I don't feel like I'm adding to a trend in need of reversal - on the contrary, I wish there were more thoughtful people who tried to think carefully, put in the time to express their opinions fully, and really engage with difficult subjects. So I think that perhaps the blogosphere is better off with a few wordy fools who try to think aloud and in the sense of intellectual full-contact sports. As for race, I think the media is talking about it pretty minimally, as I assumed they would. And looking at this from primarily an American perspective. I'm inevitably looking at this from a Korean perspective, because it is here in Korea that I sit, live, and work. It's here that I have worked with a lot of kids who look just like Cho in background, culture, and personality. I thought that I'd be one of the few people talking not about there necessarily having to be some "cultural angle" on this, but that there should be room and though given to the possibility. If anything, the problem isn't that the American media is focusing on his race, because it really isn't, and even if it did, I don't think it's bad to talk about possible cultural specifics, if done appropriately. However, the real problem is that the American media should have been talking about: - why is it that only males are serial killers and mass murderers? - why are they mostly white? - when they aren't, what's the reason? Instead of shutting down a conversation about the profiles of these kind of people, we should be opening it up. Were there some factors about extreme Christianity that led to this? Does this have nothing to do with the fact that some of the most outspoken and extreme Christian groups among American youth are of Korean descent? Is this question "wrong?" I don't think so, if we are also asking, "Why are serial killers almost exclusively white?" There is a serious racial undertone to ALL such murders, in that the perpetrators are almost always white, as well as the overwhelming presence of gender, in that they are always male? This is as obvious as the hand in front of my face, yet when I was asking these same questions in Columbine, no one wanted to go there. And nobody did. Instead, we look at Marilyn Manson, video games, and other things that were obviously not determining factors, since I'd engaged in all above activities, but don't go around killing people. I loved me some NWA, and they were actually TALKING ABOUT going and killing white people. Yet, I didn't "go get my AK." I guess it WAS a good day. I'm saying that this whole brouhaha stems from the fact that Americans still have amazing difficulty talking about culture and race, in what is supposed to be the most diverse and multicultural society in the world, where anyone can be a citizen. We're getting better at it, but we're still not good at it. So now, we're told to believe, before anyone even knows anything, that Cho's particular pathology could have had nothing to do with any cultural malaise, or that some of the roots of his alienation may not have had to do with being Asian. I'm not saying there necessarily are, but to meet such a question with "this question is irrelevant. culture has nothing to do with this. conversation over" is equally un-productive. And as for people saying that my ideas can be "co-opted" for the "other side," I just say that this is thinly-vieled intellectual cowardice talking, because I'm not a hillbilly in a pickup truck talking about shooting the next Asian I see because he took daddy's factory job away. If you think that's what I'm saying, or you confuse what I'm saying with that, you're more paranoid than you think you are. People should be talking more about aspects of masculinity here, because all these killers are MEN. What's up with that? People should be talking more about whiteness because the vast majority of these people are WHITE. And when they so shockingly and brutally aren't, we might ask the question "what traits did he share with the Columbine boys?" (which the media is already asking), but we also might look at "what traits might have been different that also got him to the same place of being able to commit mass murder like this?" And if we're going to be comparing to Columbine, while never even really having an intelligent about the fact that the politics of whiteness as an identity, masculinity, and feeling of extreme alienation seem to lead to something, if we can agree to talk about all these things with the Columbine boys - IF - then in Cho's case, we'd have to also talk about the one thing he did NOT share with them and the MAJORITY of the rank of the killers he has so infamously joined, that being his Asianness, Koreanness, or whatever - in any case, his non-whiteness. That makes the case of the DC snipers ALL the more interesting, all the MORE remarkable. If you were a criminal profiler for the FBI, or a clinial psychologist, or an administrator in charge of schools, I hope these people would find such questions interesting. If someone held an academic conference about it, I'd hope they'd attend, rather than close one's ears and boycott it. But that seems like what most people want to do. I don't fear some imagined backlash against Asian men; sure, there may be a few idiots out there who do something, but overall, it's probably for any particular Asian male right now to die in a car accident, or of lung cancer. So buckle up and stop smoking - I don't think anyone has to hide in their houses. But the disappointing reaction is, "Stop talking about race! He was just some crazy fucker!" No, he wasn't. No, all the killers weren't. There are clear patterns here. Start with the fact of maleness and extreme alienation, along with feelings of victimhood and desire for martyrdom. Then work your way down to identifying any overarching cultural patterns in white or Asian (Korean) socialization patterns, similarities in self-identification, all that stuff. I'm not a psychologist. But if I were, I'd be licking my lips over this stuff. Has there been no one who's written a doctoral thesis about "The Role of White Identity, Disaffectation, and Constructions of Masculinity in Serial Murderers"? Maybe that's a wack topic, and it's not my field. But seriously - has no one done research on this? Come on? Is this really such a taboo topic, even to a research psychologist? Anyway, mums the word. All the serial killers were just crazy fuckers. Let's just leave it at that and act all surprised AGAIN when this happens AGAIN, which it will. And for all those imagined white guys who are cutting out eyeholes in sheets to go get that Asian male grad student who took that last fluffy donut from the tray in the cafeteria (those BASTARDS! they're really taking everything!), don't worry: The next mass murderer, statistically and historically speaking, will probably be a white guy, anyway. So what's everyone worried about? At least the imagined heat will be off Asians, right? Whew! -------------- ORIGINAL POST -------------- Over the last 24 hours, it's been suggested that even broaching the issue of possible cultural issues when looking at the case of Cho warrants being labeled "racist." Salon.com has linked to a previous post from this site that relays the story that several university administrators in Korea with whom I spoke when Fulbright Korea hosted a tour here expressed concern about the fact that they saw a pattern of Korean students studying in the US having trouble adjusting, and that those students were almost exclusively male. This was several years ago. Or read this: Although Asian Americans were at relatively lower risk of homicide in the 1970s and 1980s, they have experienced increasingly higher risk since the 1990s. From 1970 to 1993, the homicide rate for Asian Americans in California increased 170%.13 Asian immigrants are also at significantly higher risk of homicide than Asians that were born in the United States. The growing trend of homicide among Asian American communities coupled with the increase of Asian American youth violence thus poses an urgent issue of concern for Asian Americans. Whence these racist, cultural arguments? Another, from the same source: Despite the model minority myth that Asian Americans as a whole are economically and academically successful, delinquency among Asian American youth has actually been on the rise in recent years. In the past 20 years, the number of API youth involved in the juvenile justice system has increased dramatically, while national arrest trends for Black and White youth have decreased. Arrest rates for Southeast Asian youth (Vietnamese, Cambodia , Laotian), are the highest within the overall API population. Studies have shown that peer delinquency is the strongest predictor of adolescent delinquency. Other suggested risk factors for adolescent delinquency among Asian Americans include personal experiences of victimization, acculturative conflict, family conflict, and individualist versus collectivist orientation. More racists? Or how about a report on "Violence Affecting Asian-American and Pacific Islander Communities", compiled by Masters candidates at the Michigan School of Public Health? But wait? For me to pose questions that perhaps young Cho Seung-hui could have had "personal experiences of victimization, acculturative conflict, family conflict, and individualist versus collectivist orientation" that maybe, maybe could have played a role in his pathology... How did I become "racist? for asking the same questions? Here's what I wrote in the original post, which was fired off in the heat of the moment, upon the initial revelation that the shooter was of Korean descent: A group of American university administrators whom Fulbright hosted nearly 10 years ago, when being a tour of Korean universities, asked the staff, "Why is it that out of all our international students, Korean males have so much trouble?" To my surprise, all of the university officials cited incident after incident of Korean male graduate students who seemed to have trouble adjusting, often got into fights with other students in the living spaces, and were often the source of trouble in dealing with romantic relationships gone bad or women in general, especially when they involved Korean females dating non-Koreans. In the longer post, I continued asking questions that were pretty basic and acceptable before two days ago, pointing out that many Asian and Asian American males often face cultural pressures particular to the Asian cultures that they come from, as well as socialization as an Asian male in the greater American context as well. How dare I say such a thing? Funny how the raison d'être for community organizations such as the Koreatown Youth & Community Center (KYCC) can talk about: ...programs and services...specifically directed towards recently-immigrated, economically-disadvantaged youth and their families who experience coping and adjustment difficulties due to language and cultural barriers. Yet when someone points out that perhaps some of Cho's pathology had to do with being an Asian male, subject to possible culturally-determined pressures as well as that of being subject to socialization/discrimination as an Asian male - all of which where conversations going on within the Asian American community until just two days ago - this is now out of bounds? So asking the question before this incident was OK. Asking it after Cho's bloody rampage is now grounds for arguing that one supports an ideology of racial superiority. That's especially funny since my mother is Korean and I have younger Korean cousins in college now who've been through the educational meat grinder here, and I have been involved in just such community organizations as the ones mentioned above when I lived in the Bay Area. And the other sad thing about the sudden "off-limits" status of this issue is the disappointing fact that Americans of all "colors" still have such difficulty talking about the overlapping boundaries of race, nation, and culture. Pointing out before this incident that Asian/Asian American males had specific identificational and cultural concerns, especially when one is talking about 1.5 generation Korean Americans (which is how Cho is generally being referred to now) was OK and actively encouraged in multicultural settings, especially since this was expected of anyone who wanted to convey one's real cultural sensitivity as an professor, teacher, counselor, social worker, or psychologist working with a variety of people from diverse backgrounds. I have worked with and am familiar with a few community-based organizations when I was back in Oakland, and had many Korean American friends who work in orgs related to specifically "meeting the needs" of Asian American youth, dealing with the issue of domestic violence in the Korean American community, and was familiar with several other non-profit orgs that dealt specifically with problems of reducing participation in gang activity among Southeast Asian youth, issues specific to that community, organizations based in Chinatown, as well as other places around the East Bay. I have friends who've worked deeply within many organizations that held the assumption that "culture matters" and that Asian/Asian American youth had specific needs that should be recognized in the larger community. I know people who stayed up long nights applying for city, state, and federal grants to operate such projects, programs, and organizations that took the relevance of disaporic culture and its effect in Asian kids in the US as a central assumption of their reason to exist. Now, after this incident, culture not only doesn't matter, even broaching the topic is grounds for being labeled a "racist," even when one is working well within a set of affective connections to a community for which such issues have been stated concerns for years - nay, decades - before Cho Seung-hui walked into a Virginia Tech classroom and started his rampage of death. Yes, of course he was an individual, and he is fully responsible for his actions. But Korean culture now stops at the airport? Or with a green card? That's certainly news to me. I guess I didn't get the memo. And I guess I should also be expecting my KKK membership card in the mail any day now. Thanks, Salon, for declaring such talk as mere "instant prejudice." Funny thing is that I, as well as the university administrators mentioned in my initial reaction, Asian American community organizers, and a whole lot of other people were thinking in these terms for years before this. Now, some would have us go in the opposite direction: As coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting continues to unfold, AAJA urges all media to avoid using racial identifiers unless there is a compelling or germane reason. There is no evidence at this early point that the race or ethnicity of the suspected gunman has anything to do with the incident, and to include such mention serves only to unfairly portray an entire people. The effect of mentioning race can be powerfully harmful. It can subject people to unfair treatment based simply on skin color and heritage. I feel that point of view, but much of the popular reaction has been to link mentioning culture or nationality with "racism" itself. And the many Asian and Asian American commenters who've written in, saying that my apparent status as "white" or a "neocon" or a "loser who can't get women at home" or far worse names. Yep. There I am. That's why I live in Korea, why I learned Korean, why I write these incessantly long posts, and why I conduct my research. But when I pull out my Korean-mom-racial-membership card, does that mean I'm a self-hating Korean American? Do I only hate half of myself? Or maybe my Korean "half" hates my black "half" and we are in eternal conflict. I think I have to go beat myself up now. It's interesting that the mode of even calling me "racist" relies on racist slurs and categorical assumptions. My point is that I shouldn't have to pull out the "my mom's Korean" as a magical shield in order to say what wasn't unreasonable to say until before this incident. I should have to play identity politics as a qualification to talk about identity at all. That's one of the thing that makes this whole thing get more and more ridiculous. Does anyone forget that the film Better Luck Tomorrow, which touched on Asian American identity, socialization, alienation, violence, and other facets of Asian American culture - especially from the perspective of Asian American masculinity? So after the fictional violence witnessed in the narrative, we can talk about such issues - which is what I assumed the filmmakers wanted when it went mainstream and didn't merely screen in art house theaters? But after a real incident that could be seen to touch on similar issues, now that real people are dead and dying, broaching the subject gets you lumped in with the Klan. I better remember to tell my mom that I hate Koreans now. That should be a fun conversation. And just as I said, here are some of the conversations people are having now in Korea, from a look at the Korean press. From The Korea Times (which has masked its URL, so no link is possible: "I couldn't believe that someone like me was really involved in this brutal murder," a netizen (ID hahaha) said. Other people showed the same response as they said they have begun to feel more responsibility for the case when they found out that a Korean was involved. Others said that the case looked similar to some cases happening in the Korean military where young soldiers try to desert from their barracks out of love or relationship issues. I'm not saying that they're right or wrong. But these are questions people are asking. Are Koreans "racist" for asking these questions, which a lot of us are thinking about as well? There are also questions raised over studying abroad at a very young age _ quite the fashion in Korea at the moment. As domestic media in the U.S. referred to Cho as a "loner," people are now questioning whether sending their kids abroad for study would be good. There were constant reports of children feeling lonely and causing problems with drinking, doing drugs or having sex problems, but the massacre has triggered the debate on whether such studying is really needed. Cho flew to America when he was a little kid, and is said to have not made himself accustomed to the different culture. ``I think his being alone made him a loner, and made him do something horrible. And would you still say that won't happen to your child?'' a blogger grandchyren asked. From The Korea Herald, as I grimly predicted, and as is all too often the case when extreme shame from one's relatives or persons within one's realm of concerns brings shame to your or your organization, both his parents attempted to take their own lives, the father apparently "successfully": Los Angeles-based Radio Korea reported Wednesday morning that Cho's parents attempted suicide, according to neighbors. Cho's father reportedly slashed his wrist after having learned of his son's alleged killings at around 1 p.m. Tuesday, Seoul time. Cho's mother attempted to commit suicide by taking toxic drug, Radio Korea said. She was quickly transported to a nearby hospital, but is listed in critical condition according to the report. No, culture isn't a factor at all here, and it should most certainly not be talked about, right? No one was surprised a couple years ago when a scandal ensued in a high school over a student who had been physically abused, which, upon reaching nationwide proportions, the principal took a leap off into the Han River. No one in Korea was really shocked by this, although the incident is unfortunate. I'm not talking about ancient, fetishized elements of a Hollywood movie about samurai over a swelling soundtrack - I'm talking about real people. And I guess me having expressed the concern that his parents would immediately attempt suicide in a similar way was just me being "insensitive," rather than observing that such a thing is not only not unusual in a situation like this in a Korean context, it's not at all surprising, however unfortunate. And in my head, when the leading cause of death for Korean teens and twenties in South Korea is suicide, most often caused by culturally specific forms of stress, isolation, and social factors that are not factors in different cultures, and I see a Korean kid - and again, I am of the old-school Asian American assumption that culture doesn't stop with a green card, but I guess I'm old-fashioned and "racist" in the post-Cho Seung-hui era - who struck me as possibly influenced by similar concerns...why is it suddenly inappropriate to raise the notion of culture? Just because it makes us uncomfortable now that it's real, raw, and in the nation's face, as opposed to the more hidden back rooms of our ethnic communities? This is not saying that there were no factors related to Cho being American. Surely, obviously, naturally - there were. He wasn't an exchange student who got off a place last September. He lived and socialized and breathed and experienced life in America. And yet, even without getting into the fact that Korean culture doesn't stop at the airport terminal when a kid is 8, and that he's generally considered by even Korean-Americans as a "1.5er," let's not forget that he was Asian American; in other words, he was not white, and most likely did not see himself (and I'm going out on a limb here, as many of the people who adamantly insist that Cho was and could have been "American") as "just another kid." A similar attitude of non-reality surrounds the fact that no one asks the question of what aspects, if any, of whiteness or white identity itself informs the fact that in most such incidents, the perpetrators are white, middle class males? A few people poked at the question after Columbine, but most people chose to toss that hot potato. I'm not saying being white cause you to kill people. I am saying that it should be OK for us to ask certain questions about what peculiar concerns there just might be in terms of socializing, identifying, and being labeled as "white" and male in American society, especially in the midst of America's "culture wars," major shifts in norms and role expectations with regard to not just race, but class, gender, sexual orientation, and perceived amounts of privilege? These are some questions that people in Whiteness Studies ask, which is a new and necessary branch of inquiry partially related to Ethnic Studies. It recognizes that "people of color" do not just exist a blank backdrop of nothingness, but that "whites" are "raced" just as much as "Blacks" or "Asian Americans" or "Latinos" or any other recognized (and socially constructed) racial group in the United States. Yet still, some people think Whiteness Studies must necessarily be a group of people trying to assert "white rights" or be secret Klan members. Yet, when a dated-but-smart film such as John Singleton's Higher Learning deals with the journey of a white kid who feels alienated, ostracized, and actively victimized as a white man, who then goes to a high perch with a high-powered rifle to start a killing spree, it's lauded and applauded. Until some white kid(s) actually commits such an act in question, at which point asking certain questions is out-of bounds again. Generally, as a doctoral student and young scholar in Ethnic Studies, I've noticed the tendency to confuse talking about race with being racist. This is frustrating to no end. And in the case of Cho, it really wasn't about race, but more about nationality and culture, and asking the question of the extent to which Cho's obvious inner pain and turmoil just may have been culturally specific and valenced. But again, if the shooter had been an "Arab terrorist" I think the cultural argument would help us humanize him - who was he? How did he get caught up in this? What were some personal frustrations as a poor, Palestinian (for example) boy with few future prospects that might have made him an easy recruit? Is this line of questioning "racist?" Then I guess, so is it all, including the Harvard School of Public Health, where a conference convened around a very similar issue in 2004: Faculty, students, and fellows interested in disparities in health care due to ethnic and racial differences convened at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) Friday (May 7) for a symposium seeking to translate research into practice. Topics discussed at the all-day event, the Second Annual Symposium on Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities Research in the U.S., included Latino and Asian mental health, the increasing presence of minority researchers in the field, societal determinants of health, quality of care, and politics and policy as related to ethnic and racial health disparities. The "racism" continues: Among the wide variety of topics discussed was new research on the mental health status of Latinos and Asians in America. Margarita Alegria, director of the Center for Multicultural Mental Health Research at the Cambridge Health Alliance and a visiting professor of psychiatry at Harvard, presented preliminary research from the National Latino and Asian American Study, begun in 2002. The study, conducted in five languages, is a broad survey of Latinos and Asian Americans across the country and aims to fill in gaps in the information available on the mental health of those two ethnic groups. The study so far shows that Puerto Ricans have a higher incidence of mental health disorders than other Latino groups, which also include Mexicans, Cubans, and a category for other Latinos. It also shows a strong trend of increasing mental health problems for Mexican-born immigrants the longer they are in the United States. To a lesser extent, other groups showed a similar correlation of increasing mental health problems with time in the United States, until they had lived 70 percent of their lives in the United States at which point the trend levels off. For Asians, Vietnamese show a lower incidence of mental health disorders than other groups, which include Chinese, Filipinos, and other Asians. Alegria said researchers couldn't yet explain that low incidence of mental health problems for Vietnamese. Alegria said the survey shows considerable regional variation, with mental health disorders increasing for individuals who live in parts of the country where their ethnic group is not concentrated. For example, she said, Mexicans, who are concentrated in the Southwest, had higher mental health problems when living in the Midwest. Cubans, who are concentrated in the South, had greater problems when living in the Northeast. "Where you live really makes a big difference in your risk for psychological disorders," Alegria said. One possible explanation for the higher rates of mental disorders among Puerto Ricans, Alegria said, is selective immigration. Alegria said more Puerto Ricans than other groups reported that they had immigrated because of health reasons. In addition, she said, there may be a demoralizing factor at work. Puerto Ricans, unlike members of the other ethnic subgroups, are U.S. citizens. They also report higher levels of English fluency. Alegria said Puerto Ricans may expect to be more socially mobile after arriving in the United States. Alegria said the survey provides an important starting point for further research. Among important questions to be answered are the higher rates of disorders among Puerto Ricans, the lower rates among Vietnamese, the roots of geographic differences in different parts of the country, and the connection between length of time in the United States and rising incidence of mental health disorders. There are a million questions I'd ask the kid if me and Cho Seung-hui were sitting in a room and he had agreed to talk to me. The first one would have been "Are you feeling frustrated for any particular reason?" Another might be, "Are you feeling any academic pressures, any stress from you parents?" Who knows? These are perhaps overly direct and useless questions, since I'm not a trained mental health care professional - but if I were, I sure would be attentive to issues of his cultural background, especially if my file on him indicated the possibility of that perhaps there might be more going on here than just your standard, John Doe pysch services referral. It's a place to start. But he's dead, and that'll never happen. But to imply it's racist to ask these questions, to even think about the concerns of Korean American youth like Cho, who may well find themselves precariously placed along pressure points between family, friends, and school as defined in cultural, educational, linguistic, and pscyhological terms - this just boggles my mind now. Posted by Michael Hurt on April 19, 2007 -- Archived with permission of author. Original Source: Scribblings of the Metropolitician http://metropolitician.blogs.com/scribblings_of_the_metrop/2007/04/on_the_forbidde_1.html
April 18, 2007 [Update: I stand by my piece, which is mostly a bunch of questions, rather than statements linking race and culture in the explanative way it is being taken. I merely pointed out that as an American working deeply in the education field for years now, and having identified just such problems (and seen them connected in the Korean-language media for years), that perhaps questions about culture, as related to specific conditions that surround child-rearing, education, being educated overseas, the taboo of discussing mental health in Korean society, etc. might not have played some role here, on top of the fact that many Asian and Asian American males indeed might have specific ways of feeling alienated in "white society." Obviously, to even broach mere questions is deemed "racist" by many readers. Fine. I don't delete comments (unless they are abusive) and people have a right to come in and say what they want - that's why I blog, after all. Yet, before we start flinging around the "R-word" I hope people actually think about what I'm saying, and remember that what I said was that cultural context may be helpful as far as looking at context, but that "Korea" and the rest of the world should look at him as an individual. I spend half my post saying that, and the two need not contradict. And yes, when it comes to the fact that most serial killers have been/are still white men, it does astound me that America seems to have trouble talking about this obvious fact, and mums was the word when Columbine happened. Yet, broaching the topic is going to get one accused of saying their horrendous acts were committed "because they were white," which would again, be not what I said. But pundits of all kinds of backgrounds have license to talk about the concerns of "black youth" as it relates to drugs or violence for years. I don't call doing so "racist" although some strains of it certainly can be. For those who call such explanations as this "back-tracking," well, I guess you can call it what you like. I feel that despite the obvious difficulty anyone can have theorizing culture as a backdrop for what are undeniably individual actions, people are only reading one side of what I am actually saying, even after I have carefully delimited the extent to which "culture" can be expected to lead to culpability. I speak as an educator who watches (and inevitably participates in) the nearly inhumane grind of the education system here, the extreme testing regime these kids are expected to endure, the harsh penalties meted to those who can't, the sudden skyrocketing of youth suicide due directly to mental health problems linked to academic achievement, and myriad other pressures that quite often lead to education in the US as a goal for Korean kids. And even in the Korean American community, the culture of such processes, as well as the patterns of culture do not necessarily end with a green card or an American address. So, in that context, this does frighten me, and I think this incident, while extreme, does warrant reflection on some serious structural shifts in Korean education, the family, and other factors between which Korean kids get crunched in the middle. If you want to call such efforts or lines of thinking "racist", I can't stop you. Yet, I think it's significant, from this side of the water, to think about the fact that yes, he is not a white kid from Colorado, especially against the backdrop of what's been happening in Korean education in recent years, as well the socialization of males in Korea and Korean culture. And since mine is an identity partially shaped AS an Asian American man, as well as an African-American one, I have a more direct interest in asking these questions. And if you think I am saying I lay claim to all the answers, I want to make very clear again that I don't profess to have them, and I don't consider culture as responsible for his actions here. But to assume from the very beginning that "it doesn't matter," when I think it may be worth looking at, especially given the copycat nature of high-profile suicides in Korea over just the last couple of years, I would hate for there to be a similar effect over there. Call it "racist" if you will, but mental health professionals have been saying for years that there are cultural factors when it comes to mental health concerns, especially in communities in which such talk is considered taboo. I guess to raise such issues in this context, no matter how carefully prefaced or qualified, is taboo as well. So, are all Muslims terrorists? Clearly not. Are the vast majority of terrorists in recent years Muslim? Clearly, yes. I don't confuse the logic, yet it's easy to do. Yet, the mainstream media talks about the mindsets and motivations of many of the young men who get recruited up into horrible acts. To talk about "culture" as some generalized, essentialized force would indeed be "racist;" but to talk about the factors of poverty, religion, and the motivations for entering such groups isn't; they are reasonable questions. Do they dismiss the actions of individuals? No. People are all responsible for their actions. Just as we talk about the "culture of poverty" or in more recent years, have more elevated conversations about African-American culture and what often leads black male youth to join gangs, or commit crimes in ways that white males generally don't - I also don't consider that "racist." But is a black gangster responsible for his acts? Damn straight s/he is. I find it unusual that it can be legitimate for me, as a student back at Brown in the 1990's, as an active Asian American and "multiracial" on campus, to listen to job candidates for the Psych Services position talk about the "special mental health needs of Asian American youth" and for Asian American campus reps to sit there and nod approvingly while they talked about educational and familial pressures, relate those to Asian American notions of masculinity and femininity, and a lot of factors that I mention in this article as clearly relevant, but merely broach the subject now is completely out of bounds. Unlike the mainstream American media, or whichever talking heads are on TV right now in the States, I've been thinking about something like this happening for years now, in a Korean context; I've actually wondered when and if something like this might happen, and how this may play out. I come at this from someone who lives and works in South Korea who works with kids in high schools, college, and alternative schools daily. And as I look at this both as an Asian American and an American living in Asia, I don't think cultural pressures and patterns can be so easily discounted out of hand, as mere "racism", and suddenly unworthy as points at least worth thinking about. In the end, Cho wasn't just another white kid who committed yet another school shooting. But he also isn't the representative of Korea, nor his diasporic nationality, nor his supposed "race." He was a warped individual. I am simply saying that perhaps there are factors in his "warping" that may have had cultural aspects worth thinking about, especially for those of us concerned about the mental and spiritual health of both Asian and Asian American youth. And that's where I'll leave it. If you're looking for "answers," keep looking, and don't think you'll find them here, or blame be either for professing to have them, or not having them. I don't, and don't claim to. I lay out some things to think about below, but mostly ask a lot of questions that I think are worth asking. And I am somewhat surprised that even broaching the topic, no matter how tentatively or awkwardly, is somehow "racist."] This is sort of a followup piece to "The Walking Wounded" post that clearly is spurred on by the recent events at Virginia Tech, with the mass murder-suicide of Cho Seung-Hui, the worst in American history. As I try to formulate a response, I do so while trying to stay true to my own intellectual convictions, while trying to make sense out of something that is far more complex than any single person can make out. How will I interpret this? How can I? I can't profess to know the mind of the killer, nor work from information that I don't have. And the media speculation will go on and on, while the Korean media will work in "national shame" mode that is the necessary flip side of the extended "national pride" that is taken in anyone of Korean descent who does anything of note overseas. I'm of two minds about this, but I don't feel my impulses are in conflict. On the one hand, I feel like this incident makes it worth looking at some of the social factors that very well could have helped determine one man's actions; on the other, we have to remember that Cho was an individual, and that the faulty logic that "Korea" is the bearer of collective guilt over this incident is just as flawed as Korea taking full responsibility for a member of its "own" who had been socially cast aside, as was the case with Hines Ward. My posts on the issue: "Korean Folks Don't Like Black People" "Hines Ward - Lost in Translation" "Hines Ward - Nail On the Head" "On 'Korean Blood," Social Policy, and the Dangers of Race-Based Nationalism" "Where Do Koreans' Ideas About Race Come From?" "Hines Ward - What If?" "The Gates of the Minjok" í˜¼í˜ˆì¸ 내가 'ì›Œë“œì‹ ë“œë¡¬'ì— ì§œì¦ë‚˜ëŠ” ì´ìœ (in Korean) 한국 ì˜ì–´ì‚¬ì „ì€ ì¸ì¢…íŽ¸ê²¬ ì „ì‹œìž¥? (in Korean) More interesting to me than the details of all this and trying to figure use the blunt tool of structural arguments and social psychology to tease out the subtle and complex motivations of an obviously troubled individual, are the implications this will realistically have for Korea tomorrow morning, when this hits the Korean public when it gets up to read the paper or catch the news over coffee and the morning commute. This is a big moment - and I am thinking mainly along these two lines. There will be a lot of things worth thinking about, social problems worth looking at - but at the end of the day, Cho was an individual. And "Korea" can no more be held "responsible" for this horrible crimes than it could have been for Hines Ward winning the Super Bowl. On the issue of someone like Hwang Woo Suk, the folly of setting him up as a hero and the irony of his inevitable fall was much more of a marker of the society in which he lived, because his status as a public figure depended on the collective mind and will of the public. He was not a true individual, but rather a figure created according to the needs of a government, media, and public who created him. The shooter in Virginia was a Korean (the extent of his ties here having yet to be determined, regardless of when he apparently gained residency there), but he was also - and importantly - an individual. That is something that will be hard, but necessary, to remember over the days and weeks to come. Cho Seung-hui will live in the national identity of Koreans forever. He is the anti-thesis of all the national "heroes" whom Korea imprudently lauds as extensions of the national character (again, Hwang Woo Suk), as somehow expressions of the positive character traits imbedded into the genetic material of Koreans itself. Now, after this horrible affair, perhaps the faulty logic of those connections will be apparent. I wonder if the move will be away from that logic itself, or an ongoing circus show of national shame. I do hope that the logic of not performing the latter will be apparent. Strategically, the best thing to do would be for the South Korean government to express its remorse and regrets, make meaningful yet symbolic gestures expressing those sentiments, and move on. If an American did this while studying in another country, I would expect the same from my government. "That crazy dude has nothing to do with me." But that's not the way this is going to go down, is it? At least at first. There is going to be serious national shame, expressed through the shock of this "representative of the culture" - even if the kid had been living in the States most of his life. There will be Korean media pointing at the parents, expressions of shock that "a Korean could do such a thing" (despite the fact that violence in the schools and against women are actually rampant in Korean society), and the glee that many people here in South Korea have at pointing out "American" character traits whenever horrible things happen in the US will be inevitably tempered. Because the flip side of the logic now applies, like a mofo. Let me just say that I don't know the details right now, besides the basics of the shooter having been identified. Nor does anyone else at the present time, really. I'm writing, getting a million Messenger messages a minute, and don't have time to closely scan the papers as I write this, not that there's a lot of information, anyway. In a way, I don't want to, as I want to write what I write clean, before the details make the issues temporarily more obfuscated, as they surely will. But in the end, will we ever know why Cho did this? Like the Columbine shooters, we'll speculate forever. Even when if and when we realized a concrete motive, how does one truly know when or how an emotionally fathomable rage becomes a horrible, inexplicable madness? So I'll go with what I got, which is a lot of opinions about South Korean society, education, and social problems involving youth, education, and women in this society. I will say right now that I am extrapolating far too much from this incident from the git-go, but I think my lines of argument will tend to make more sense than the Chosun Ilbo or Hangreoreh will, or most "explanations" of this horrible incident. In a nation that wants to crack down on the rash of gang rapes and ongoing sexual violence committed against girls and women by launching a campaign against foreign porn sites as the main solution and logical conclusion, what, oh what, sense will the media make of Cho Seung-hui? Let me just start by saying that I see a lot of social factors converging that might offer a social context - not an explanation - to this situation. It's also an excuse to talk about some social issues in Korea (since this is, after all, what this blog is about) and do some more productive hand-wringing than I think the mainstream Korean media will. I wouldn't even be surprised if this is used as more ammo to show just how much America can "corrupt" good Korean youth. Just like Western porn is responsible for Korean boys (and girls!) conspiring to rape and sexually extort the victims that have made the news in a couple of pretty scandalous cases over the last few months. And since my posts can tend to go on quite a bit, let me just list these topics, in no particular order: This isn't new (HT to reader). Several years ago, I was with a group of university administrators being given a tour by the US State Department, hosted by Fulbright Korea, and being given a tour by a respected mentor of mine when several of the administrators stopped to ask a question that seemed to be burning at them for some time. "Why is it that Korean male students seem to have the most trouble adjusting to life in the US?" Kind of surprised, but yet not, I and my mentor pressed further, and they explained that the students who had the most disciplinary problems of all their international students were Korean males. These representatives of large state universities all then cited incident after incident of Korean males threatening Korean students seen walking with a foreign man (a graduate student walking with her black professor - she received dozens of insults and death threats on her answering machine), physical conflicts with other graduate students over simple matters, and a some domestic violence in cases of Korean couples living on campus. In that conversation, what came out is that many Korean men felt displaced and disempowered as males who lived in a society that catered to them, while in the US, those forms of automatic power and status - being male, rich, or having come from Seoul National University - mean nothing. And at the same time, Korean women experience a social liberalization compared to where they would often be in Korea; many Korean female friends and colleagues of mine who studied in the US cited how they felt constricted and uncomfortable (부담) when a Korean male would end up in a seminar with them, because often, the man would expect them to acknowledge or "respect" (ì¸ì •) them. When they didn't receive it, and often were dressed down by people younger than them or female, or by the professor in front of the class, they often felt particularly frustrated. And that has been a big issue and has led to social conflict and trouble before. And that is just about all I'll say on that. Then there's the interesting fact that the record holder for the worst shooting in world history, Woo Bom-gon (우범근), is also Korean, this time a Korean national who lived in Korea. That's not in the least bit interesting? From about the only other site on the Internet I could find on this subject (there is exactly one I could find through Korean search engines, and that's a pretty weird site): South Korean spree killer. Has argument with girlfriend. Being a police officer, Woo Bum-Kon robs the police armory and goes on a drunken 8 hour shooting spree through three villages, leaving 57 dead and 35 wounded before he suicides with two grenades in Uiryong. The Korean interior minister resigns. (28 Apr 1982.) Sound familiar? So the top two spots for shooting sprees in history are now held by two Korean men. Hey - I just find this interesting. Is this information not somewhat relevant to the issue at hand? Don't know why the Korean media isn't picking up on this. Or maybe it will? This is another interesting fact to throw in with the others. Even The New York Times had a piece on it back in 1982. Well before this incident, and with the high number of suicides and actually pretty gruesome serial murders that take place in this country without guns - and I've heard Koreans joking about this as well - people wonder what Korea would be like if guns were legal and freely available here. Given the recent spate of violence and suicide in the schools here, I also give a shudder. Suicide is rampant in South Korean society. It's the #1 cause of death in people in their 20's and 30's in Korea. And since I consider these incidents of mass murder as actually horribly violent forms of suicide - "take a few with you" - I think it's something worth thinking about. I've blogged about this extensively, especially as it's related to the education system. How do you add up the affects of parental, societal, and other kinds of pressure on Korean youth, the extent of which few American kids I know even come close to feeling? I've already said enough about this that doesn't need to be rehashed here; it's better to just read them directly. "The Walking Wounded" "On Suicide in Korea" "On the Korean Obsession With Educational Success" "Podcast #27 - The Korean Education System" "EPIK as Case Study: Why Korean-Style Management Sucks" "Attack of the Clones" "The Phantom Menace" Violence against women is endemic in Korean society. What would be called stalking or considered inappropriate is often standard practice here in terms of dating, sex, and marriage. I often cite the case of when I saw a man slap his apparent girlfriend as hard as he could, sending her head back with visible shock. In front of a police station in Chungmuro, where, as a photographer, I had made my haunt. I immediately walked over, shooting away with my motor drive, saying that "you can't do that" and that I witnessed it. He looked annoyed and ignored me, at which point I walked to the police station about 20 meters away and informed the older officer on duty of what I had seen, in fluent Korean. He seemed annoyed, but obliged to get up out of his chair, and he went over to the door, cracked it, observed the couple still fighting, and said, "It's OK. They know each other." After I asked him if "this is all cops do in Korea" and "shouldn't he go check?" he just told me to go home. He never even asked if she was in trouble. That's a lot better than the incident, circa 2004(?), when a group of boys from some small town outside of the capital were convicted of serially raping 2 high school students (they had been in middle school at the time, if my memory serves) after one boy had had consensual sex with one of the girls but had videotaped it and used it as a weapon to make her sleep with other boys - up to 30 or 40, I recall - and also impress her friend into similar sexual service. When this was discovered, the girls were berated by police as having run a prostitution ring, and were called sluts and whores, while the parents of many of the boys as well as members of the community gave death threats to the girls' mothers for "ruining their sons' lives." And such stories keep popping up again and again here, while the tendency is to not punish the men at all, if possible. I personally attended a small protest around a large police station in relation to this issue, which many Seoul residents and the more enlightened did, to their credit, find reprehensible. But the level of violence against women here, as many Fulbrighters have heard as they lived with Korean host families all across the country, in apartment complexes where you regularly hear women being viciously beaten and screaming at night - no one calls the cops, except for me, it seems - and the many times I've seen women just straight slapped around in public...the level of violence against women that is readily apparent if you live here is undeniable. I can't speak for all foreigners here, but this is something I hear again and again and again. And yes, there is sexual and domestic violence everywhere in the world, but this is a place where I can't even count on two hands the number of times I've seen a women slapped down in public. And no one does anything. How much is a woman's body really worth here? Other factors? In the end, we just can't know. So it's not even clear how much time Cho spent in the US, although it appears he has spent a considerable amount. The information is changing by the hour. How does one sum up one's connection to culture(s)? But I do think it is worth at least mentioning the factors that often affect Korean men living as foreign students in the US, the pressures that come from living in one of the least happiest developed societies in the world, where I argue that the mental violence of the repressively harsh developmental dictatorship has finally started to find expression, even as the pressure cooker that is the failed Korean education system sends more and more Korean students overseas at an earlier age, to experience more stress and even higher parental expectations. What can we make of this? Well, it just strikes me that the motive for a male Korean student to commit this heinous act apparently includes being feelings of revenge against his girlfriend and was precipitated by a fight with her. Beyond that, one can't really speculate. One can only talk about factors that might illuminate. But speculate and make specious extrapolations the Korean media will, and I assure you, dear readers, that they won't stop at mere speculation around social factors, but there will be a slew of culturally essentialist assumptions that lead to really suspect "conclusions" as to what the "real problem" was. It will get more complex if he turns out to have lived most of his life in the US. Then, the onus of cultural responsibility can and will be shifted to "America." If his ties to Korea are stronger, then perhaps his parents will be blamed for his actions. They will be anyway. Although it is not a nice thing to foresee, I wouldn't be surprised if other suicides out of shame come from this, especially if "national blame" gets shifted to the individual, and by extension, the parents. In Sum But sometimes, we just can't "know." The pathology of the individual isn't something nations should be responsible for, because this isn't a logical or fair thing to do. If I go out right now and kill all of my officemates and then blow up a building, much will be made of my political leanings, little "signs" from the scribblings on my blog here, and most likely the anger I had after Katrina and talking about the song "Bin Laden Didn't Blow Up the Projects." But maybe it was me. Me who was crazy, me who wanted to take out my anger in a horrible way. Is my nation responsible? Is Bush? Are my parents? Was it because I played Sniper Elite on my Xbox, or Halo 2? When the process of going over Cho's life with a fine-toothed media freakout ends, I'm sure we'll see a lot of such explanations. But in the end, I don't think we can ever know. How does one know the face of madness like this? If we could, wouldn't it be easy to spot and prevent? However, this incident leaves a lot to think about. Not the least of which is the fact that the linking of "national pride" is just about as useless as the linking of "national shame", but the cultural logic of this is far from out of favor. Perhaps if one positive thing comes out of this, it will be a national discussion of a lot of these issues, and if we're lucky, people will be even asking the question, "Does 'Korea' even really need to feel responsible for this?" One might even see an angry rejection of this "national shame" - which in some ways, I think would be healthy; psychologically, it may be useful and hence, inevitable. In the end, this will be the beginning point for a lot of different discourses around culture, race, and nation. People can and should now talk about all the things that very well may have gone into influencing one Korean man's way of expressing his anger, however inappropriate that may have been. There are cultural patterns to things that are caused by clear and present structural influences, customary and culturally-informed modes of interaction, and a great number of things. But that doesn't mean "Korea" is responsible. Thinking about both factors will involve walking a subtle line that will be very, very easy to cross. I just hope the conversation can be more elevated than some of the things I can imagine being said about this incident, this one troubled man, and the culture of which he was, to some extent, a part. A few more thoughts... And on the American front, things are still swirling. How will race, gender, and sex play into this, as well as the stereotypes of Asian Americans in general and Korean Americans specifically? One thing that occurred to me was that I'm sure Arab Americans are breathing a sigh of relief that the shooter was not of Arab descent or Muslim. That's the last thing the Arab community needs in the States. I'm sure most people were expected the shooter to be a white male, as almost all mass murderers in recent years have been. What is interesting is the fact that the mainstream American media has never made much of the fact that serial killers are almost exclusively middle-class, white men. The FBI and criminal psychologists have this as a base assumption; interesting that in the public mind, this is not even a question. Imagine if nearly all serial killers were Korean; or Arab; or black; or female. Then, it would mean something, right? The gun control lobby will have a field day with this, while the NRA will likely emphasize (thanks, Jacco, for changing my mind about this) the kid's immigrant status and the fact that it wasn't the gun who killed those people, but an immigrant on a visa. Yes, people kill people, and it's not just the guns; but is sure is easier with a Glock 9mm with a low trigger weight that pops off bullets as fast as your index finger can flex. And back in Korea, I really hope that after the nation has gone through the expected paroxysms of guilt and shame, that some South Koreans will tire of it and say, "OK, enough. Why do I have to feel bad about some crazy kid who cracked? It's not my problem." And I think I'd feel the same way; I'd have to agree. From there, if that happens, the real interesting questions and debates can begin. More than anything, I hope that this might be what it takes to partially break the foundations of national identity into smaller and more interesting parts, ones that can be digested by a logic other than the dichotomy of "pride and shame" and into something more complex. An even more unlikely hope will be for the Korean media and by extension, a large part of the populace, to move past the crude and problematic stereotyping and categorical thinking that defines a lot of the discourse around foreign others, and even Koreans themselves. Perhaps now, the logic that because the murderer who dumped a girl's body in Ansan Station turned out to be Chinese means that "Chinese are dangerous" will now become suspect. Or that "Arabs are dangerous and terrorists" if the shooter in this case had been Arab, or that "America is dangerous" because of this incident, when it's much more likely that you'll be killed in a car accident than shot by a Crip in a driveby or even a crazed killer in a school. Because by extension, that would mean that "Koreans are dangerous killers" who should be avoided, or "are all about to snap." I doubt Koreans would accept that, as well they shouldn't. I just hope that this can translate into the realization that the logic is equally flawed the other way around. Posted by Michael Hurt on April 18, 2007 -- Archived with permission of author. Original Source: Scribblings of the Metropolitician http://metropolitician.blogs.com/scribblings_of_the_metrop/2007/04/the_politics_of.html
Justify it as you like, I cannot think of Cho Seung-Hui as anything other than a murderer. A lot has already been said about the subject, so apart from the links to his plays here[link], I won't be saying much. The content of his plays being sophomoric aside (in all honesty my high school freshmen have written richer and deeper material than this), I don't think the content of his plays immediately says that he "fits the profile of a school shooter." As a previous entry said, there is no such thing as a profile; each situation is born of unique circumstances mingling with the unique turmoil in each unique individual. However, it is a definite warning sign of a person being disturbed, coupled with his general attitudes and way of pushing others away. Help was offered, but he refused it and did what he wanted to do anyway. One can't help but feel powerless when confronted with a person like this. The other school shootings we had in the past were perpetrated by children who I think could have been talked to—just that insufficient attention was given to their behavior. However, this guy was already an adult—like many other instances of adults going on a rampage, they have already made up their minds and will no longer respond to reason. This is why it is imperative that schools should take events like this seriously. Sure, they are aberrations, but this implies that somewhere, something went wrong. The most immediate problem seems to be security, of course. Students will not be able to bring firearms (or poison, as in the case of Gelyn Fabro) if the security weren't so lax. Guards search bags, yes, but do they know what they're searching for? Of course, there's also the whole issue with of how the person is treated. The school can only do so much—personal and parental problems are already beyond the reach of guidance counselors—but still, the school can provide the student with an environment where he or she can express his or her frustrations in a harmless way. Cho's situation was different—this guy was already an adult, and that's why I believe that his problems were already beyond reasoning. He had to deal with them by himself, and he couldn't. He had to choose the worst possible option. But for high school students, I believe that something can be done. Of course, people are different. There are university students who might be receptive to counseling. Cho's case is indeed an aberration, but aberrations do not excuse the school from not taking any action. In his case, action was indeed taken. Schools just have to be sure that they've done everything in such cases. I've always believed that elementary students need a teacher who they could see as a parent. In high school, they need a teacher who they could see as a friend or elder sibling. In college, a student needs a teacher who he or she could see as a mentor. Thankfully I've had such teachers in all my years in the academe. On a less serious note: Another Mario parody[link] ~ by J. R. R. Flores on April 20, 2007. -- Original Source: http://aslancross.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/in-the-mind-of-a-murderer/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
Confessions of a Would-Be School Shooter
By now the subject of Virginia Tech has been much publicized and probably hackneyed. We talk about lax gun control laws, wasted lives, disturbed young men and how we wish things like these would never happen again. In my previous entry[link], I talked about how problematic Cho Seung-Hui is and the difficulty with which we tend to see the minds of these people. We always talk about things like these happening to someone else. However, as Bill Watterson once said in his great comic strip series Calvin & Hobbes, "We are all someone else to someone else." And so instead of talking about Cho from a distance and saying how crazy he was, I'd like to talk about how I was probably just like him. As I read through TIME's articles on the VTech massacre, I began reflecting on my own past and how disturbingly close I came to becoming a school shooter. In real life, I'm a very quiet person—meaning I don't speak much. If I have something to say and feel it's absolutely necessary, I have a very loud voice. Most of the time, though, I prefer to keep to myself and do not really talk. This habit caused one of my co-teachers to remark "You know, if one of us is going to become a psychopath, it would be Joey." Of course, I'd just laugh and shrug off the remark. It was only today that I realized how close I was to this. In one of my earlier posts I talked about how I was so maligned by my classmates in grade school. I really hated them; there were times I'd think about seeing their corpses hanging from a large weeping willow tree on campus. Seriously. I think this started after my parents' marriage was annulled, but I don't blame it entirely on them (and I presently harbor no bitterness toward them in this matter). There were a lot of events that led to certain, er, emotional imbalances I had in the past, I myself am not really sure how they add up to one another. Regardless, I was a young boy who was full of hate and I can very clearly remember that at one point I really thought about shooting my classmates. Dad had bought an air rifle at that time and I was beginning to learn how to use it, and I remember telling them to stop bugging me because I had a gun. Of course they mocked me even more, at which point I just kept quiet and seriously thought about blowing their brains out. How old was I then? Ten. The next year, I was beginning to move closer and closer toward rebellion, and my mind began to darken. I just have an eerie feeling that if the events of my life did not transpire as they have, I would have ended up walking onto campus with deadly weapons and making away with the lives of those who I saw as inferior, then myself. The difficulty in getting weapons aside, I certainly had the potential to be a school shooter. I don't know how it happened, but God somehow dealt with the events of my life at that point and eventually brought me to Him. There were times I'd still feel that I was alone against the world (I still sometimes do) but I cannot deny that it was something much more dangerous before. I wanted to lash out against a world I thought was inferior to me, a world that I felt worthy to judge, a world that oppressed me. Later on in college, I met the very guy who I had really felt like killing several years before. We were both waiting for a cab outside the university, and since we were both going in the same direction we just decided to take the cab together. We talked a bit about how the other was doing in college, where we planned on going when we graduated, and so on. I really don't think this would have been possible had my Lord Jesus not wiped away the bitterness that so stained my soul at a young age. When I was a child, I felt like killing children. Now that I have grown in the grace of the Lord, I feel it is my calling to help them truly live. And this would all not be possible without my God working in my life. In His death I died to myself, and in His resurrection I rose again to a new life. Thus I have come to appreciate even more what He has done for me. "And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God." -Romans 12:2 Teaching and not Shooting, Your Black Lion PS: I'm going on a short hiatus starting Tuesday night until Saturday. I'll be going to Pagudpud with Martin, Arghs and Fil. Yes, I'll finally be going to the beach. ~ by J. R. R. Flores on April 23, 2007. -- Original Source: http://aslancross.wordpress.com/2007/04/23/confessions-of-a-would-be-school-shooter/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
April 23, 2007 Filed under: Feminism, Minnesota Monitor, Virginia Tech — Jeff Fecke @ 12:21 pm It is human nature to try to figure out why bad things happen. Long ago, we blamed natural disasters on the capriciousness of the gods. The flood was caused by Poseidon's wrath, the storm by Thor's fury. Gifts were given to the gods, sacrifices of fruit, of animals, even of people, in order to placate them and turn their anger into love for their human charges. Today most of us (Pat Robertson excepted) reject the notion that bad things happen because of an angry and vengeful God. And yet, when tragedy strikes, we still seek to find the pattern underlying the madness, our ultimate failing that led to our punishment by...well, we're never quite sure, but we're sure we're being punished. After Cho Seung-hui opened fire on his classmates in Blacksburg, Va., it was only natural for us to ask why. The primary answer — that he was a deeply troubled, possibly schizophrenic and certainly psychotic man who was operating outside the bounds of normal society — is unsatisfying and seems to beg more questions than it answers. And so some writers have seized on an explanation that has a mythic history as rich and powerful as any blameworthy figure in human lore: It's the women's fault. Not all women, of course, but specifically feminists. These horrid people have, we are told, upset the natural order. They have made women more like men, causing them to demand for themselves the same privileges and prerogatives that men alone have traditionally enjoyed. At the same time, they have demanded that men stop behaving like louts, thus feminizing them, making them more female, robbing them of their manly virtue. National Review columnist John Derbyshire started the drumbeat by arguing that all of the students should have been armed, the better to kill the shooter. But that wasn't his main point. "Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals," he wrote, "why didn't anyone rush the guy? It's not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns, for goodness' sake — one of them reportedly a .22." Nathan Blake, a writer for the weblog Human Events caught Derbyshire's meaning and amplified it. "Something is clearly wrong with the men in our culture. Among the first rules of manliness are fighting bad guys and protecting others: in a word, courage. And not a one of the healthy young fellows in the classrooms seems to have done that." Now, you may think that blaming students for not rushing a man with two semi-automatic handguns is, to put it nicely, insane. Especially since there were more than a few examples of bravery that day, from the resident adviser who gave his life trying to protect the first victim of the shooting to the students who held the door shut with their feet while Cho fired away above them. But of course, one should never let facts get in the way of a good session of blaming women. Besides, it wasn't just the men hand-wringing about those wimpy men; there were also women hand-wringing about those tough women. Sarah Baxter, writing for the Sunday Times of London, fingered female sexual promiscuity as the reason that Cho Seng-hui went on his rampage, going so far as to quote long-time scold Camile Paglia in her argument. "The pervasive hook-up culture at college," wrote Baxter, "where girls are prepared to sleep with boys they barely know or fancy, can be a source of seething resentment and alienation for those who are left out. "'Young women now seem to want to behave like men and have sex without commitment. The signals they are giving are very confusing, and rage and humiliation build up in boys who are spurned again and again' [said Paglia]." As the Kinks once said, it's a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world. And that's when the gods get angry. The scolds, of course, never really explain why it is that "young women behaving like men" is confusing and enraging — or at least, why young women behaving like men is worse than young men behaving like men. They don't have to bother. We all know that good girls don't, and cool boys do-the message is driven into us, all of us, from the moment we become aware of what sex might be. If anything exacerbated the insanity of Cho Seung-hui, it was this message — the message that if he was worthy, he should be having sex, and lots of it. That if he was worthy, women would and should be lining up for him — but not the pure and chaste ones. Normal people learn, at some point, that this message doesn't make a lot of sense; that sex, while entertaining, is neither the best nor the most important measure of human worth and human happiness. We learn that whether you're having sex or not is a truly meaningless measure of your worth as a human being — whether you're a good girl who is, or a cool boy who isn't. But Cho Seung-hui wasn't equipped to deal with this message, this drumbeat that he was a failure because he wasn't successful with women. And so he turned his rage to violence, first stalking women, then ultimately attacking them. That his rage reached a violent crescendo that included men as well was unsurprising, for it wasn't women he hated, or men — it was himself. The killer internalized the messages of what men are "supposed" to be, and when he could not measure up in his mind to that standard, he did the only thing he could think to do — he became ultra-violent, violence being another acceptable proof of manliness. It wasn't a shortage of manliness that was the problem last Monday, it was a surfeit. And so we come to find that the fault, if there was fault that we can assigned, lay not at the feet of the women who rejected a stalker, nor at feminists who want people to have rough equality, nor at men and women who faced a horrific massacre and did not all fight back against nigh-impossible odds. If there was a fault, it was that we as a society continue to try to tell people what they're supposed to be, rather than letting them determine that for themselves. That's not as satisfying as blaming women, nor as simple as blaming victims. But it's the truth, and we do ourselves and the dead no favor by pretending otherwise. (Cross-posted from MinMon) -- Original Source: Blog of the Moderate Left http://moderateleft.com/?p=3324 Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States
Virginia Tech: The Challenge of Instant Communication in a Crisis
Wednesday, April 18, 2007 I have been percolating some ideas about how to better integrate technology into a crisis plan I am currently working on. My work with the Red Cross over the years has sharpened my senses and I do have some idea of how to successfully communicate during a crisis. However, this week's events at Virginia Tech have given me some further ideas. I don't want to start getting clinical about this before I say that I am deeply moved by the tragedy this week. Having lived in Virginia for many years I feel close to the tragedy, and moreover, because we have a dear friend who is a professor in the engineering department in V-Tech. I heard from him Tuesday night and am grateful that both he and his freshman daughter are okay. That expressed, there are many lessons to start learning, especially as we prepare for the unexpected and communicating to large groups in crisis. There was a great story in the Wall Street Journal today that (registration req.) discussed the use of disseminating information via texting in a crisis. I have pulled some of the information about services from that article. My main takeaway from this event is the need for redundancy of communication. There need to be both high and low tech layers of communication to be most effective. First and foremost, an organization has to have a strategy to get in touch with all of the stakeholders and employees that need to be reached. A good start is a list of employee cell phones and home phone numbers that are ready to use in an emergency, as well as emergency contacts. Having a crisis communication plan is essential to get the most out of our communications, but here is an incomplete checklist of tactics to consider: High Tech Strategies Have a service set up to send instant text messaging (SMS), one such service is run by Omnilert and costs about $9,000 per year, another for schools is and opt in service run by Mobile Campus Set up redundancy in the servers to handle any increased load Set up and Instant Communication Platform, something my friend Ike Pigott calls the Situation Room. Running this on a blog platform is a really handy way to control the speed of getting the message out. Immediate updates on the web page that could be pulled from a blog platform E-mail blasts Harness the culture of Facebook and MySpace and maintain profiles there for instant communication, especially in the aftermath of events Make the online information you share easily viral so that it can be passed on via blogs and other social media without diluting the message Use YouTube to distribute video responses to a wider audience which includes advertisements High Touch and Lower Tech Equip employees across the areas that might be affected in a Paul Revere-like system of notifications. Distribute pagers and give training for instant response in disseminating messages across wide geographic or spread out operations. Consider a service to deliver mass phonecalls to cell and home numbers Employ an audio warning system, like the siren system installed at UT Austin after the shootings there in 1966, or better yet, one with audio voice warnings, as by this video it seems they used at V-Tech Have good relationships with bloggers and mainstream media to get messages out fast This is just a start of the list and it will be governed by the needs of an organization and budget. However, these kind of "incidents" could happen anywhere and we need to be prepared to meet the challenges. Do you have anything to add to the list? posted by Kami Huyse at 1:41 PM -- Original Source: Communication Overtones http://overtonecomm.blogspot.com/2007/04/ambulances.html This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.
Note: I found writing this piece to be a way of channeling my own anger at the massacre this morning. But I recognize that anger is only one part of the grief process. Please join me in praying for the families and friends of those killed. American worships the gun. Today, 33 more were sacrificed on the altar of our devotion to the gun. Specifically to semi automatic handguns. There are already dozens of articles from disciples arguing that the massacre today at Virginia tech could have been avoided if some of the students had been carrying guns so they could shoot the killer before he killed them. We trust the gun more than we trust God. The brutal reality of our gun fetish is that selling guns and ammo is highly profitable. But it is not simply the fact that the market values short term earnings from gun sales more than the social, cultural, political and long term economic damage that gun violence does to our society. More importantly, the gun industry long ago learned to effectively invest their short term earnings into the social, political and cultural sphere. Their investments in the NRA, especially since 1977 years have returned 10 fold and the results are a culture in which gun ownership is intimately connected with the values of self-sufficiency, responsibility and security that so many Americans identify with. We'll call these frontier values. As much as we'd like to wish that the new Democratic congress would seize on this moment to pass some common sense gun laws, the reality is that many of the new members of Congress were partly by actively courting those with frontier values. Unless their constituency shows signs of disconnecting handguns from frontier values, any vote for limiting the sales of hand guns will be doomed. It may be that changing our gun culture requires looking at movements that have successfully challenged large corporations with large amounts of cultural capital. The anti-smoking movement comes to mind. The last 30 years have seen a drastic shift on the public perceptions of smoking. The parallels are striking. The right to smoke was once also closely associated with frontier values. The industry also heavily invested in cultural, social and political institutions to maintain and promote the cigarette. For a time it seemed that they were effective. But these days its very hard to find anyone in political office trumpeting the rights of smokers. What were the tactics and strategies of the anti-smoking lobby? They brought law suits by second hand smokers against big tobacco. Unfortunately a law passed in 2005 protects the industry from any parallel suits. Another tactic of the anti-tobacco movement was its relentless funding of anti-smoking advertising. Through memorable add campaigns they have gradually associated with smoking with disease and decay. It seems this solution has much potential given the brutal reality of gun crime. Is the anti-gun lobby much less well funded? Have they not found the right message? Of course, part of the anti-smoking victory can be attributed to the scandal of Tobacco companies lying to consumers for many many years. This highlights a major difference between gun industry and the tobacco industry is that gun manufacturers are much less visible in the debate then big tobacco was. The NRA is by far the most visible and powerful gun lobbying organization. The wikipedia article on Smitth & Wesson tells the interesting story of how gun owners turned on the hand that fed them after Smith & Wesson was seen to have compromised on gun control. But there is hope. In the United Kingdom after the Dunblane Massacre, more than 700,000 Brits signed the Snowdrop petition calling for a total ban on the private ownership and use of handguns in the United Kingdom. The petition led to the Firearms (Amendment) (No. 2) Act 1997 which completely banned handguns in the UK (this was the final in a long series of hand gun control laws) According to a report from the home office, from mid-2005 to mid-2006, only 49 people were killed by handguns (Homicides, Firearm Offences and Intimate Violence 2005/2006, page 36). This is a rate of roughly 1 per million compared to 55 per million in the US (FBI 2004 Crime report). It turns out that a mandatory five-year jail term for carrying a hand gun does have an effect. I lived in the UK from 2004 through 2006 and noticed that fatal shootings were so rare that they regularly made the national newspaper. People take the hand gun ban for granted and find the gun religion in our country to quaint and strange. On one of my first evenings in the UK I watched a documentary in which a UK reporter went deep into US gun country and interviewed gun disciples. It was like watching an exotic safari. Change is possible. Massacres like the one at Virginia tech do not need to be a reoccurring horror in our headlines and our lives. Let's work together to end our worship of the gun. This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 6:44 pm by TimN -- Original Source: Young Anabaptist Radicals Blog http://young.anabaptistradicals.org/2007/04/16/the-altar-of-the-gun/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
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17 April 2007 The talking heads keep talking about the "VT Massacre", not that it doesn't deserve attention, but this is too much attention. And VT is getting a bad wrap unfairly on one specific point: the notification of students on campus as to what was going on. The media seem obsessed with the 2-hour gap between the first shooting and the campus-wide email. They think the whole campus should have been told immediately. This is a short-sighted and impatient assumption, and is definitely not appropriate in a time like this when cooler heads should prevail. First, when the first shooting occurred, no one knew what the hell was going on! As with any incident like this, the police responded immediately, and their first priority was to figure out what happened. From what the VT police have said, they had reason to believe the shooter had left campus. So, what good would it have been to lock the campus down? And even if they had, how would that have stopped the assailant from coming back, as this may have only added police officers to the list of the dead. My point is VT authorities didn't notify anyone immediately because they didn't know what to tell them! In this age of information and 24-hour TV news, many have been spoiled into thinking they should have answers immediately, and that someone has failed them if they don't. Spoiled is definitely the best word for that outlook. Answers aren't always available right away, and rarely is the complete picture seen even days after an event like this, if ever. So, why are some in the media out to vilify the very people who were trying to protect the public and figure this whole thing out? I can see no reason other than lack of understanding and sensationalism, neither of which is an acceptable answer. --- On a different note about the incidents of yesterday: As a life member of Kappa Kappa Psi Honorary Band Fraternity, as was receiving updates on the status on members of our chapter at VT. All were accounted for by midday and none harmed. But we did get unfortunate news: One of the fallen was a member of the VT Band, a brother-in-arms, if you will. From the Marching Virginians website: The Marching Virginians are deeply sorrowed by the loss of fellow MV and friend, Ryan "Stack" Clark. He was a loved friend, mentor, and role model who will always hold a special place in the hearts of all the MVs as a true example of The Spirit Of Tech. Stack, we thank you for all the memories, and for sharing with us your true love of life. We will love and miss you always. Please continue to keep those up at Virginia Tech and their families in your thoughts and prayers. -the Progressive Conservative posted by Matt Collins at 4/17/2007 08:51:00 AM -- Original Source: http://conservativeprogress.blogspot.com/2007/04/on-vt-massacre.html This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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Desensitization, Detachment and Virginia Tech
Apr 23 2007 Written by Lynn Kindler To all family, friends, and people affected by the horrific and sad shootings at Virginia Tech, please accept my heartfelt sympathy. I know that I am joined by many others who are keeping you in their thoughts and prayers. With that said, I've been putting off writing about how the shootings affected me because I did not want to add to all the hype and gander that is already going on about it and because my initial reaction was NOT what I had expected to feel. Being an extremely intuitive person, I'm used to "getting" insights and a heightened sense of awareness before incidents like the one at VT occurs—often weeks before. This time not only did I not intuit anything but as the events unfolded I had no feelings about it. I'm a very caring person and since my initial non-feeling bubble, have had many insights but the initial non-feeling sensation really caught me off guard. I checked with many of my friends to find out how they reacted and found out that there were many very caring, spiritual people who had the same initial reaction as I did which was the absence of intense emotion. After listening and reading some of the news about VT, what was revealed to me was the seemingly collective response of not wanting to fan the fire of the media. The way that many of the people from Blacksburg handled this event, showed a majority of caring and thinking people who wanted to respect the event and all its complexities without the media circus. I am inspired by the people who have been writing and communicating under the mass media radar through www.facebook.com At first glance, I wondered if what "we" were experiencing en-mass was desensitization towards violence. How many of us wake up to NPR in the morning with the latest recount of a suicide bomber event? But someone very close to me noted that as listened to me she could hear anger under my numbness and upon closer inspection I realized that I was angry about our ignorance of mental illness and how to handle it fairly and successfully. I was angry about gun control (a rifle I can see, an automatic weapon—why?) and last but not least watching the story unfold in the media bit by bit as every one tried to become THE source for facts about the VT shootings. In many of my spiritual teachings I have learned that it is important to be able to detach with love. It seems that in order for me (and you) to be effective, we've got to be able to get our personal spin out of the mix so that we can detach from the intense reaction in order to respond thoughtfully. It's about being able to feel and yet not getting run over by our feelings. I am very hopeful about the kind of ideas and actions that will come out of this horrific event. I heard one student interviewed who responded, "What can we learn from the Amish shootings". One thing that we can do right now is to have difficult conversations such as what I'm admitting to you here and be willing to talk with each other about what is really going on. As the great Coaching guru Thomas Leonard used to say, "Be real be human". -- Original Source: http://www.smallbusinessgurus.com/content/view/460/60/ Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5.
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