What a difference a month makes for a college.
I have to say that what happened this week at Virgina Tech surprised me as well. Although to me the surprising part was that it happened in a high-class college and not at a hellhole public school, like the schools I’ve gone to.
As some of you know, I have a scathing report against the Public School system, for the one reason being that I was one of those people who, as Dennis Miller says, had a tick (as in ticking time bomb) that had an echo. I was driven into an inner world from sixth grade to well into my 20s because of the environment in Granite City School District #9. The combination of the pressures by the faculty and the hostilities from my peers caused me to suffer a break from reality. This was during the Eighties.
I’ll say this again: What I summarized in the above paragraph happened during the Eighties. There was a very good change that you’d be seeing my name on top of all the School Shooters you’d know today. I could, I very well could, become one of those monsters, just like Cho Seung-Hui.
It took me a while for me to get out of that darkness in my psyche, but I managed to with help and support. I have a more or less better adjusted lifestyle with my own apartment, a steady part time job, and a budding writing career with a lot of material to work with thanks to the time I spent in my own personal Wonderland. But every now and then I think back to what might have happened and shudder.
I could have been blowing up a real brick and mortar school, rather than write about a fictional school becoming the victim of a pair of Pier Six Brawls: Adam v Hook above it, Pan v Blackard inside it. Another teaser for Lost Boy Found. Let’s just say that the school never had a chance.
But that’s not saying that I don’t have any sympathy toward the tragedy in VT. I feel terrible for the loss; it shouldn’t be done to a college that good. And I’m convinced that nobody realized that there was a problem until that student actually arrived to the school. I don’t think that Cho’s family or even Cho himself knew about it until he enrolled. And that family’s Korean, I heard they’re more close knit than normal.
But I know that there are others who are just about to start ticking inside. Maybe they started to slip into that darkness that I know all so well, maybe even as young as I was. I got lucky, I was able to get back from that brink. But it would be even better for me if I was helped out from that darkness before I was a teenager. Before I slipped into my inner fairy tale world for over 15 years.
If Cho was showing signs of what he might become before he was a teenager, and he got help at that point, maybe things would have been different.