A Quiet Kid.

In my earliest years, I wasn't the quietest kid. Somewhere between third and fourth grade I made the transition from extroverted class clown to introverted shy nerd. I got beat up. Girls laughed at me. Even the fellow outcasts I surrounded myself with made fun of me. The less I spoke, the less fodder I'd offer for mockery. My parents were no longer concerned about my hyperactivity, and a single visit to a child psychologist on that matter was left in the past. Fearing I might do drugs or fall in with the wrong crowd or be seriously injured by the wrong crowd, and wanting a better life for me, they saved and sent me to a private high school. There was no physical abuse, not to the extent of what I'd endured up to that point, but plenty of psychological abuse. I was the son of a mechanic in a thrift shop suit, surrounded by the sons of doctors and lawyers garbed in name brand new clothing. I escaped into comic books. I withdrew for months at a time, not socializing with my friends from my old school and even turning down invitations from lifelong neighborhood friends. I've been called horrible things and compared to horrible things. I've been through a lot and I've done a lot. I've never killed anyone because of it, and rest assured there is no unwritten “yet” in that statement.

When something like the Virginia Tech Massacre happens, when someone snaps and takes lives, and it makes no sense, we try to make sense of it. Was it the video games he played? A rap video? Maybe he was on drugs? My father even asked me at one point if I thought Cho Seung-hui was sent by “the terrorists”. Blame is cast, and even before all the facts were out I was seeing unrelated clips from video games on the news. The one common factor in these situations always seems to be the same. He was a quiet kid. He kept to himself.

So why doesn't every quiet loner who gets picked on snap? Why do so many of us channel our pain into positive creativity, or develop a sense of humor? We learn our comfort zones, learn to break out of our shell and gradually develop relationships with trusted friends. There's nothing in popular culture that instills hatred and violence per se. In most cases it's only a trigger for something that's already there.

Could this horrible, horrible tragedy have been averted? The killer was autistic and a loner that rarely spoke. Along with the video that was irresponsibly broadcast, one student is interviewed and speaks of trying to reach out to Cho. He never responded, never spoke or made eye contact in the hall. After a while the other kids stopped trying. Could they have tried harder, or was the underlying bad wiring too screwed up for Cho to ever respond?

What will set someone off? How do you diffuse a ticking time bomb? Maybe other students made fun of the way he spoke or dressed, but many got to him without knowing it. Just by being wealthy, or better dressed, or whatever, they were stirring all these thoughts, and no one knew what was happening inside his brain. To be sure, there is a lesson for young people to learn about how they treat one another, to realize everyone has feelings and words have consequences. But this too falls under the search for rationale. Sometimes, as Swanshadow put it,the person might just be a “whackjob”. It wouldn't matter if he had strong faith, or responsible attentive parents, or friends. Nothing anyone said or did would have altered his chemical imbalance.

32 people are dead, cut down before their lives really began. 29 more are wounded. All were caught in the crossfire, and Sean raises a point that Cho might have started with himself. It was a thought out and orchestrated plan though, from purchasing weapons and ammunition, to filming the videos to send to the media, to a manifesto complete with photographs. And there it is again, that link between creativity and pain. A normal person finds positive outlets. Write a poem. Paint a picture. Tell a joke. A disturbed person orchestrates mass murder and visual companion pieces.

Amid media vying for ratings and politicians turning loss into gain, the best thoughts and coverage of this week came from Darrell, who actually stopped writing for a few days and set up his site as a memorial. He and his family live a mere two hours away, and his response reminded me that we all are close to something like this at any given time. It's sad that death is so commonplace that we become desensitized, and sensitivity decreases with geographic distance. We hang on to routine for a sense of sanity and normalcy, and sometimes it takes a while for things to phase us.

He was a quiet kid. He kept to himself. A lot of quiet people keep to themselves, and I'm left pondering the irony in Eleanor Rigby:

”All the lonely people; where DO they all come from?”