It's not as if I've never thought about tragedy. My memories of Columbine (in the 8th grade) and 9/11 (as a junior in high school) are crystal clear, and those were terrible and shocking times. But nothing like the recent events at Virginia Tech has ever had this effect on my sensibilities. The Columbine killers were batshit insane, clearly -- citing Marilyn Manson, violent video games, the whole bit, giving overprotective parents and conservative assholes more fodder for banning anything with the minutest bit of potential for causing emotional distress or inciting violent tendencies in young people. The Columbine killers worked together, a deranged duo on par with the craziest of Charles Mansons, Jeffrey Dahmers and suicide bombers in parts of world I can't even fathom living in right now.
And 9/11, that was a time of horror we shared as a nation, completely bewildered at the insanity of people who lived far away and worshiped in a way absolutely foreign to our own; people who gave no thought to the lives they snatched away, so utterly set upon their own sick, twisted, brainwashed ways that they transformed the way our nation carries on even more than five years later. I watched, like every other American, for days and days, cable news and local news and printed news, trying in vain to learn, trying to make sense, trying to forget the pain.
But this Cho kid, he grates my mind and heart in such a way that is so awfully, so nauseatingly familiar. I went to a small school on the East Coast, in a state that shares a border with Virginia. I was an English major with a creative writing minor. I took fiction classes and poetry classes and playwriting classes. I knew and even associated with the weirdest of people, literature students who wrote about situations and characters that impressed and even intimidated me, though mostly because the creativity and thought in these works were beyond my own. Being an English major pushed me to take my own analysis, my own creativity to levels I never knew existed. There is something about a community of writers that is like no other interaction or dynamic in the world, and daily I try to reconnect, if only in my mind, to that world in order to retain that writer's high, that intellectual plateau.
I could have known Cho. He could have been that silent kid in poetry class who took half-joking, half-disturbing jabs at certain members of the college community in his biweekly creative writing submissions. He could have lived in the dorm down the street, crossing the street the same time I did to get to a 10:30 class. I could have tripped over his chair in the dining hall; I could have rolled my eyes and made snarky, completely unfounded comments about him with my friends because that's what college girls do.
My story is exactly like any other college student's story: delightfully average. I got drunk; I danced; I cried; I stayed up all night and failed tests; I stressed over nothing; I walked downtown and ate egg sandwiches at 3 in the morning in the rain.
Now, here's where it all breaks down. There were people I disliked in college; there were people I met in college that will be my best friends forever. Where, in all of this, does a boy decide to buy a gun? When does he decide to commit the most heinous of acts and take another person's life? When does it all end for him? What, exactly, are this thoughts the morning of April 16? What does he feel when he pulls the trigger, and then decides to keep pulling it? These are questions I will never know the answer to, because my mind cannot comprehend a mind such as his. There is an abrupt and sudden disconnect between the deepest, most secret part of my brain where my darkest thoughts reside, and the point where I can comprehend even with the most open and objective mind how the entire godforsaken world a person can purchase a gun and decide the only way out of his problems is to take 32 lives.
If I were a religious person, this would shake the foundation of my faith. But instead, I'm left with such a gaping hole in logic that I'm honestly wondering how the universe can still function. How can someone like this Cho kid simply be allowed? How can such an anomaly, such a fundamentally fucked-up person not be recognized, be fixed, be done with? How could any god, any world, any universe allow this? Tell me why any parent who sends his or her child off to college should have to get a phone call saying that child will never be coming home. Tell me why the students at that school should have to struggle for the rest of their lives with what happened that morning.
Tell me how one person, one mind, can cause the foundations of worlds to crumble.
I gotta say, when I heard "Stacy's Mom" for the first time, I thought, these are a bunch of Blink-182 wannabes, thinking they're way cooler than they are. Now, though, I admonish me from back then, especially since I'm a huge fan of musical farce (my favorite band of all times is They Might Be Giants, and I saw Harry and the Potters do a live show) and should have known better. "Stacy's Mom" is not the height of Fountain of Wayne's musical talent, but it's a damn catchy song, and the band was probably as surprised as anyone when it catapulted them into the mainstream.
