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."

Who's minding the home front?

The Washington Times recently published a four-part series examining the changing views of marriage and what institutions -- such as religious groups, government and businesses -- are doing to preserve it. Click here to read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 as reprinted in World Peace Herald.

More and more people are understanding that building peace is a bottom-up process that begins with each individual and then expands to the family. There cannot be peace in the world unless there is peace in the families that make up the world.

Yet, as the series points out, U.S. society today is often not supportive of those who put priority on building strong families. Some businesses are changing, as Gregory Lopes found in Part 3 of the series, but in the main businesses reward those who work long hours at the office at the expense of investing time in their family relationships.

Recently, I was watching Jim Cramer on CNBC's investment advice program "Mad Money." Asked by a viewer to name a stock analyst he respected, Mr. Cramer named someone. He then proceeded to explain his choice by saying that this analyst worked harder than anyone else. He illustrated this statement by saying that this analyst was in her office at 5 a.m. and that at 10 p.m. she was still in her office.

These are the people who make America's economy by far the strongest in the world. But who are the people who are going to train and educate the next generation so that they can build on this success? The best way is for children to receive their training in interpersonal relations in the family. If parents are busy working from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., who is going to provide that training? The nannies?

Perhaps what will happen is that the nannies will train their own children to succeed, and they will be the ones to take over where today's generation leaves off.