Insanity has never been known to respect any racial boundaries. The less said about this the better. Now's the immediate moment for all that collective soul searching and appropriate grief over a tragedy. But the issue of Cho Seung-Hui's Korean status and how it will affect the Korean American community is just depressing. Our 24 hour news cycle dictates the pressure to find any new scurillious tidbit to feed the news cycle, and the quest for ratings would drive a major news organization like NBC to broadcast his attention seeking rants is particularly dispiriting. I'm sure they had a long debate over whether or not to broadcast the material, one in which the phrase "ratings goldmine" was probably in the back of someone's head.
I don't remember Klebold and Harris being referred to as white or caucasian in their press coverage, or what backlash that would have on the white community. It's only when you are the alien other that this becomes important or an issue or a fact that determines meaning in an event that has none. And yet we all try to decipher it.
Even more sad is this: my half Korean friend Christina notes that one of Cho's victims is a Korean American. Read about Karen Mary Read right here. For all the coverage, I could only turn up two instances of this in the news, one a local report from where her mother lives, the other in the Chosun Ilbo. Granted, Mary was a half Korean like myself and Christina, but ultimately all it means to me is that irregardless of his race, someone psychotic did something hurtful to a lot of people without regard for race, and I wish they'd stop showing his face on television and mentioning he's Korean. Our memories are short. If you visit this link you'll read how we have a history of violence in schools back to Colonial times. The greatest single deadly attack on a school in America occurred in 1927. Psychosis doesn't respect what year it is.
Call him batshit insane, evil, what have you. I wish they'd talk about our fucked up gun laws, the glock he had costing $561. That's how much it costs to enable yourself to kill a lot of people; the gateway price from the psychotic's fantasy land remaining in their head and enacted in reality by will. I wish in fact they'd stop mentioning him at all. Just stop showing pictures of him, stop attributing his like for the movie Oldboy as some factor in what he did. If anything talk about the people who were killed and what their lives were about and who they were. Remember them.
I don't remember Klebold and Harris being referred to as white or caucasian in their press coverage, or what backlash that would have on the white community. It's only when you are the alien other that this becomes important or an issue or a fact that determines meaning in an event that has none. And yet we all try to decipher it.
Even more sad is this: my half Korean friend Christina notes that one of Cho's victims is a Korean American. Read about Karen Mary Read right here. For all the coverage, I could only turn up two instances of this in the news, one a local report from where her mother lives, the other in the Chosun Ilbo. Granted, Mary was a half Korean like myself and Christina, but ultimately all it means to me is that irregardless of his race, someone psychotic did something hurtful to a lot of people without regard for race, and I wish they'd stop showing his face on television and mentioning he's Korean. Our memories are short. If you visit this link you'll read how we have a history of violence in schools back to Colonial times. The greatest single deadly attack on a school in America occurred in 1927. Psychosis doesn't respect what year it is.
Call him batshit insane, evil, what have you. I wish they'd talk about our fucked up gun laws, the glock he had costing $561. That's how much it costs to enable yourself to kill a lot of people; the gateway price from the psychotic's fantasy land remaining in their head and enacted in reality by will. I wish in fact they'd stop mentioning him at all. Just stop showing pictures of him, stop attributing his like for the movie Oldboy as some factor in what he did. If anything talk about the people who were killed and what their lives were about and who they were. Remember them.
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