Virginia Tech

I am seeing this now, rightly or wrongly, as an immigrant's story. My heart bleeds for this kid, caught between two cultures, isolated, the question mark. His parents working all hours to make a life. He has no one to talk to, fits in nowhere, and it just spirals downward until he snaps. That these pressures, these traumas, at least aggravated and finally destroyed a psyche that was already fragile. Take this terribly, worryingly, pathologically shy kid, born into a culture that is achievement-driven and ashamed of weakness, make him an alien, isolate him, separate him from his family...

The no-one-reaching-out-to-him, I tend to buy that too. But then his roommates sure sounded like they tried, and longer than I would've done. Still, maybe no one had time or cared enough to try hard enough. (Fr. Flanagan: "There are no bad boys.")

I bleed for his parents, too, and the immigrants' dilemma; the terrible cost. And it makes me feel guilty for how easy I've had it.

But what about the evil that can curdle self-pity? The choice for that?

One of the Korean pastors quoted in the paper had the courage to tell his congregation that the potential for such evil is in all of us, that "I am not so different from Cho. The father of one of the victims had the courage and compassion to call for prayers for Cho's parents, "for they too have lost a son." Some of the VT students had the strength to resolve that "we need to reach out to the loners."

Surely the voice of Christ is from these, and from Lucinda Roy, who noticed the crying behind the sunglasses and tried to help, scared as she was, and not from Nikki Giovanni, who could not see beyond the "meanness," the "weirdness," the "crap," or Leonard Pitts, who wrote "I don't want to understand this pathetic kid."