Minutes to Memories

My friend, Gary, preached some of the funerals for the victims of the Westside school shootings in Jonesboro, Arkansas, in 1998. His eulogies were quoted in many prominent places, including the New York Times, but his Christian message of forgiveness generated hate mail, which, though it shouldn’t, surprised me.

I think we have some sort of psychological need for villains to be inhuman. Do you agree? They do, after all, commit inhuman acts, so we seem to want little to do with anything that might make them relate to us in any shape or form.

Charles Manson. Jeffrey Dahmer. Timothy McVeigh. Osama bin Laden. Saddam Hussein. And now, add Cho Seung-Hui to the list.

But I’m thinking that, though writing off villains as inhuman makes us feel somewhat better about ourselves, it isn’t helpful in understanding how to make anything better.

When the story of the unthinkable tragedy at Virginia Tech broke Monday, I did not miss the irony that I was scheduled to speak on a college campus that night. By the time of my lecture, the shooter had not been identified. When I stood up to speak, there were certain thoughts that came to mind that I shared with the audience: I wonder if anyone had invited the shooter to church Sunday? I wonder if anyone standing in line at Wal-Mart with the shooter had tried to strike up a friendly conversation? In other words, I wonder if anyone had been treating the shooter as a human being?

With those thoughts in mind, I was particularly intrigued by the AP story that came through this afternoon. Matt Apuzzo wrote:

Long before he boiled over, Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui was picked on, pushed around and laughed at over his shyness and the strange way he talked when he was a schoolboy in suburban Washington, former classmates say. Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior who graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va., with Cho in 2003, recalled that the South Korean immigrant almost never opened his mouth and would ignore attempts to strike up a conversation. Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho's turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded "like he had something in his mouth," Davids said. "As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, `Go back to China,'" Davids said.

Later in the article, Stephanie Roberts recalled from middle school days:

"There were just some people who were really mean to him and they would push him down and laugh at him. He didn't speak English really well and they would really make fun of him."

You remember that he was an English major, right?

On the horrible video that Cho left behind, he said: “"You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today, but you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off."

Let me be clear: Cho is responsible for his horrific actions, and there is no excuse. What he did cannot be projected on anyone else. Everyone is responsible for his or her actions, and Cho is most definitely not an exception.

But there are lessons to be learned, I believe. And if we aren’t willing to acknowledge that he was once a middle school whipping boy, then our hopes for exposing the wrong in the world that leads in these tragic directions will be lost as well.

I’ve heard it so many times it is beginning to turn my stomach: “When asked about the shooter, neighbors recall, ‘He was a loner…’”

Our national epidemic of loneliness seems to be killing us.

Literally.