Political Frenzy

Uncle Roger is apparently not in agreement with me on my last post.

Dear Attack, From the interviews of the students I saw many tried to include “cho” in their community. Do you really want to know who’s fault it was for the Virginia Tech shooting. The Shooter! The question is how many booger-eater silent clamed-up weidos do you have for lunch or have for sleep overs? If you, as an individual, wouldn’t do that why would you expect it of society. The fault of all this lies on the shoulders of the slime ball that pulled the trigger. In the following days you will see the hand wringers question themselves and society about how this boy (23years old) needed more love and understanding and eventually, in their minds, he will become the victim. Don’t fall for it.

The first most disturbing thing about this letter is that the man’s name, Cho, is in quotation marks. The implications of that sends shivers down my spine. It may not have been intentional, but that is, perhaps, far scarier. Although it would be easier to completely dehumanize a murderer, and surgically remove them from the society that created them, it is only denial.

It was not the 23 year old Cho Seung-hui who needed friends, it was the 8 year old Cho Seung-hui who needed them when he moved from South Korea with his parents to a foreign land with a foreign language.

In South Korea the Associated Press managed to track down the man whom Cho’s father rented his home from before the family moved to the United States, Lim Bong-ae “I didn’t know what [Cho's father] did for a living. But they lived a poor life… While emigrating, [Cho's father] said they were going to America because it is difficult to live here and that it’s better to live in a place where he is unknown.”

To be 8 years old and be transplanted, all of a sudden, in Detroit Michigan. Americans, on a whole, know nothing of the kind of culture shock that a monolingual child goes through in a nation where no one understands the words you grew up speaking. Less than one person in a hundred in Detroit is Asian, and the Korean community is nigh non-existent.

The kindness and openness of Seung-hui’s classmates is what one can often call “too little too late”. Social skills are like language - there’s a window of opportunity for development.

The feral child Genie, whose real name was Susan Wiley, would excessively masturbate when bored, and when angry would hit and cut herself. Susan was raised in the California by a blind mother and depressed father. Since she was left alone and never talked to, she never learned to speak until she was 13, and foraged for food. Her behavior was extremely animalistic. (Genie: a Scientific Tragedy by Russ Rymer)

Victor of Aveyron was another feral child, who could empathize and loved to hug people. When upset he would cry and seek comfort. He never learned to speak, but he did love to express himself through music once he had been captured by Pierre Joseph Bonnaterre and brought into Bonnaterre’s home. Victor was never exposed to other humans until he wandered into the town of Tolouse. (l’Enfant Sauvage by Pierre Joseph Bonnaterre)

So why could Victor, who grew to the ripe old age of 12 without having heard or seen a human his whole life, empathize so much more than Susan “Genie” Wiley? Bonnaterre gives us some insight. He noticed that if the boy whom he had named Victor had been completely alone for the entirety of his life, he would walk and run like a normal human being, ceding to his natural physiology in the lack of a stimulus. Instead the boy ran most effectively when on all fours, like a dog, contrary to human biology. Bonnaterre extrapolates from this that Victor was raised by either dogs or wolves.

What is the implication of this? That a family of canines will be more likely to produce an emotionally stable child than some American families.

Still want to say it’s not cultural?