NBC’s decision to show photos of Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hu has been met with strong criticism. “I just hate that a lot of people not used to seeing that type of image had to see it,” said one person. I say, “Acknowledge what you just saw, and take responsibility for it.” In what is now becoming a familiar tale, we hear that Cho was picked on in school, pushed around and laughed at over his shyness and the strange way he talked when he was a schoolboy.
All of this hints at something I can certainly relate to. When I moved to California in the seventh grade from Canada, I was abused on a daily basis by my classmates for the first three months – because I was different. When I moved to Oregon around the start of junior high school, I received a similar form of treatment that I found to be equally painful. I had tried to fit in socially early on upon moving to Oregon. For my efforts I was quickly shunned.
Like most people, I was able to adapt to my environment over time. But the problem is that this kind of treatment is so widespread in the United States. Because of this, incidents like the ones we saw at Virginia Tech and Columbine are inevitable: Not everybody can take daily abuse and isolation from which there is no escape. We learn that in high school, after reading aloud in class, Cho was immediately laughed at by the whole classroom, and told to go back to China. Leaving aside the ignorance of their remark about China, that the students at Cho’s high school would even be allowed to laugh at him as they did is a pathetic statement about their educators and the narrow-minded ways they were raised.
People who don’t want to see Cho’s picture on the news are probably the same people who’d rather think that this kind of treatment isn’t common in the United States, or that somehow it’s harmless. They are wrong on both counts, and such attitudes toward this kind of abuse only contributes to the problem. If the classmates of Cho were taught sensitivity training and raised in an institution where abusive treatment of others resulted in suspension or expulsion, there would probably be thirty-three more living souls in the US than there are today.
Mark Grant
University class of ’85