Preventing the next Virginia Tech

I would like to express my deepest sympathy and sincere condolence for the victims and families at Virginia Tech.

There is much I could say about the tragedy at Virginia Tech, but I am going to write just this one post, and keep Iraq as the primary focus of this blog. This is because Iraq is an ongoing national tragedy that dwarfs what happened at Virginia Tech. At least in Blacksburg, we can be reasonably certain that the killing has stopped.

The media coverage of Virginia Tech seems to be avoiding the most obvious issue that lay behind this tragedy. Have the PC police now declared that the word "love" cannot be used in the context of this kind of incident?

Here was a young man who was in dire need of love: love from parents and/or parent figures, love from friends. People who had contact with him tried to give him love, but for some reason he did not have the capacity to receive this love or reciprocate it. He lacked even the capacity to reciprocate when someone greeted him with "Hello," which shows he lacked the capacity to receive or reciprocate even the most basic expressions of one person's love for another.

His need for love grew greater, but the capacity to receive love still wasn't there and fewer and as time went on fewer people were trying to give him love. This contradiction finally led to an explosion of rage that killed 32 students and faculty, and climaxed in his own suicide.

I was impressed by the way the chairman of the English department said she dealt with him in 2005, taking him out of class and teaching him one on one. This type of attention was probably what he needed, but the environment of a university where he was one of more than 26,000 students probably would not have allowed that over an extended period. If so, someone should have recognized this and taken initiative to move him to an environment where he could be helped. In the normal course of events, this "someone" should most likely have been his parents.

It's important to understand this process in order to prevent future incidents of this type. Until we do, these incidents will continue. We need to be able to recognize a situation where rage is steadily building up in a person, and find ways to help that person release the rage before it causes this kind of explosion of violence.

We should do more than wait for something to happen and then say, "Well sure we knew he was troubled, but our hands were tied."