On Being A College Professor after the VT Massacre

Thursday, April 19, 2007

I had nightmares about the VT massacre last night. It was on a two day delay. I knew that eventually the horror of what had happened would start to eat away at me. In part, I think my dreams haunted me precisely because I didn&#39;t talk, or rather <span style="font-style: italic;">listen</span>, to what students thought about this. I didn&#39;t check in to see if they were suffering, in shock, afraid . . . I had to think a lot about why I didn&#39;t, especially after the Provost sent us a thoughtful email encouraging us to do so. What it comes down to is that I didn&#39;t want to think about it. I didn&#39;t want to actually confront the horror of this event. I wasn&#39;t prepared for hearing any vitriol, anger or racist statements either (not that students would&#39;ve made such statements, but I worried). I am scared and frightened by what happened, and in my selfishness, I didn&#39;t want to hear anything about it, or how it affected my students.

I started to realize how frightened I was by the events yesterday while talking to my colleagues in the Philosophy lounge. I had been studying the faces of the dead at the <span style="font-style: italic;">NYTimes</span> website. But, more importantly, I had been studying the faces of the dead professors. One of them, Jamie Bishop, looked like the sort of colleague I have here. He was young, married, and well-loved by his students. Don&#39;t get me wrong, I paused on pictures of young women and men, who could&#39;ve been my own students, and found myself speechless over the loss. But, seeing the pictures of dead professors haunted me the most. And, it is precisely that which I dreamt: being hunted by a former student, being called to protect my class from an armed assailant. These are not tasks that one signs on for when he/she becomes a college professor.

<a href="http://subversivechristianity.blogspot.com/">Kerry</a> reminded me of a student we both had a few years ago, who I am convinced was schizophrenic. He was the right age and gender for the onset of schizophrenia. His papers were long, stream of consciousness writings full of references to disturbing sexuality. The more I was around him, the more frightened I became of him. I would shudder if he came to my office and I never had <span style="font-style: italic;">any</span> idea of what to do with his papers. During his senior thesis presentation, I think we all just sat, aghast at what nonsense had been uttered and scrambled to figure out what to do.

I think that one of the hard realities that we, as college professors, have to face in the wake of the VT massacre is our responsibility to get troubled students serious help (even if they frighten us). Many of us like to just avoid this responsibility (me included). After all, we&#39;re not therapists! And, I am not claiming we should start acting like therapists either. But, I do think we have a serious obligation to pay attention to our students who seem deeply troubled, and figure out ways to get them help. If we just try to get them out of our class, or ignore them, or rationalize to ourselves that they are just lazy, mean or insubordinate, then we may find ourselves deeply regretting that we didn&#39;t do something to stop them from hurting others or themselves.

The story of Cho Seung-Hui is not an anomaly. We know that there are lots of disaffected, troubled young people in our schools. And while the news reports are starting to show that his professors, at least, tried to take action, what stands out to me is how most people just ignored his behavior. Everyone knows the loners on their campus. And, most of the time these loners are the butt of jokes. Allowing such a disconnected community to exist is no longer safe, forget the moral concerns.

So, the lesson I draw from the VT massacre is that I can no longer afford to ignore the students who are manifesting very troubling behavior; I am responsible to them as well as my community.

Posted by Aspazia at <a href="http://melancholicfeminista.blogspot.com/2007/04/on-being-college-professor-after-vt.html">Thursday, April 19, 2007</a>

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Original Source: <a href="http://melancholicfeminista.blogspot.com/2007/04/on-being-college-professor-after-vt.html">http://melancholicfeminista.blogspot.com/2007/04/on-being-college-professor-after-vt.html</a>

Licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/">Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License</a>.

Aspazia / Mad Melancholic Feminista Blog

2007-06-09

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License

eng

The Tangled Thicket of Cho seung-hui, Don Imus, YouTube and American Idol

April 21st, 2007

Cho seung-hui, the Rutgers University women&#39;s basketball team, the students and Virginia Tech all form a tangled thicket nourished by the American media, overgrown with too many words, too many pictures and too many answers to too many bad questions. We, the American people struggle to navigate this thicket, for during the last few weeks we have only become more confused as if we have lost our sense of direction.

You can enter any of these words in a search engine and lose all hope of finding any rationality, any thread that will lead you out. Technorati lists 152,000 blog selections for Virginia Tech, 23,000 for Cho and 4,788 for the Rutgers&#39; team. With new posts on all of these each day, there are enough words that it would take a person probably a year to read them all. And yet we all seek a way out of this thicket of information, a clear path, a why that puts the last few weeks all in perspective.

That the media have become such a tangled thicket rather than a clear voice represents perhaps the only generalization we can draw from these events and an indication of what has happened to America&#39;s sources and ideas about information. During past tragedies-the Kennedy assassination, Jonestown, the space shuttle explosion-somehow the media brought us together and enabled us to not only have a common source of information but also a shared sense of perspective.

Just the opposite has occurred over the last few weeks. Instead of coming together we have thousands of information sources; instead of a shared sense of perspective we have something resembling a cubist painting crafted by a random group each with their own paints, brushes and sense of reality. Trying to come together has become an exercise in frustration, disappointment and even anger.

The equilibrium many have found may even be misleading, for it comes from linking with a group of like-minded people who share their own prejudices and views of the world. So instead of finding a way out of the thicket they only wander in circles, going round and round in the same place, but thinking they have found the true path. The gun control people, the gun nuts, the racists, each have their own sources, each of which views the events through a different set of glasses. It is as if one saw green where another saw red.

It is ironic that as the mainstream media have become more concentrated, the rest of our information sources have fragmented becoming the equivalent of those drug store magazine racks with titles and content that remain a mystery to those who are not part of whatever group to which that publication caters. We have an information system that in a metaphorical way reminds me of our increasing income gap, with a small amount at one end who have a lot and a lot at the other end who have only a small amount.

The concentration of the American media has had what systems people would call an unintended consequence, for with that concentration has come increasing distrust produced by that very concentration. When you are so concentrated and so big it is very hard to hear disparate opinions, harder to evaluate them, and all but impossible to find a insightful analysis.

That distrust in turn fuels the alternative media, for when people feel they are not listened to they turn to other sources. Those sources are most likely to be those whose web pages reflect their own minds. And because of our natural diversity, those alternative sources continue to multiply.

Other factors also are at work. One I term the American Idol myth. That show exists in part because of the first premise-that the media are so concentrated they can no longer truly connect with people and so they neglect natural talents that in another time would have been stars. But it also exists because more and more people hunger for their thirty minutes of fame in a society that gives people little personal reinforcement. Then there is the most troubling part of it all: egos that drive many to think they ARE good. You can find all these themes in Cho&#39;s video and writings.

Now transfer the previous paragraph to the world of information rather than entertainment. Our information sources no longer connect with people. People in turn think their information or research is as good as the experts. Pretty soon information and misinformation, truth and rumor become quickly entangled. You can find these themes in coverage of the shootings.

In a society without any common definitions of what is good and what is trash, what is valid and what is fantasy, it is not surprising that people should often wander over the line between them. And it should also not be a surprise that when they wander over that line they should also wander over the line between what is moral and what is hellish, what are values and what are prejudices. Don Imus, Cho, certain blogs and YouTube videos all have that in common, for their minds were in themselves tangles of their own egos, a false reality, and ultimately a lack of values.

Another factor is that the line between public and private no longer exists any more than the line between talent and trash, information and garbage. One of the most fascinating parts of both the Rutgers and Virginia Tech stories is that for the victims the media became almost as serious a problem as the perpetrators. In a story in this week&#39;s <em>Sports Illustrated</em>, the Rutgers women speak of being harassed by so many microphones and cameras that they were unable to lead normal lives. They talk about having to find ways to sneak to class so the media would not catch them or trying to escape the media in various way only to find the microphones have again invaded their privacy. One picture that sticks in my mind from Virginia Tech is of a banner hanging from a dorm saying "Media Stay Away," for those students, especially anyone with even the remotest connection to the shootings or the killer was hounded unmercifully.

Think of each of these as maps that could help lead us out of the tangle. The lines between expertise and trash, information and misinformation, public and private have blurred as if someone spilled water on the map so everything ran together. That is what we have to guide us out of that thicket.

The good news is that history tells us this information chaos is characteristic of changing times, especially times of large changes in how we understand and organize information. Marshall McLuhan saw this as driven by changes in media, so as we move from print to Internet just as we moved from oral sources to print, there is a period of unrest. Such periods, though, by their vary nature produce a flowering of creativity, some of which is not recognized until long after.

So in that thicket lie geniuses. The message, then, of chaotic times is paradoxical for it asks that instead of closing our minds and walling off alternative realities we need to remain open to them. As anyone who has been in the woods can tell you, the way out of a confusing thicket is not to keep walking circles, but to carefully mark where you are and then explore various alternatives. It would be tragic if after the last two weeks America was to become more suspicious, more rigid, more judgmental.

Posted by liberalamerican

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Original Source: <a href="http://thestrangedeathofliberalamerica.com/2007/04/21/the-tangled-thicket-of-cho-seung-hui-don-imus-youtube-and-american-idol/">http://thestrangedeathofliberalamerica.com/2007/04/21/the-tangled-thicket-of-cho-seung-hui-don-imus-youtube-and-american-idol/</a>

Licensed under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported</a>.

Ralph Brauer

2007-06-08

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported

eng

In Memoriam: Virginia Tech, April 16, 2007

April 16th, 2007

As one who worked with school districts across the country, I know the issue of school shootings is every school official&#39;s nightmare. The apparent random nature of all the shootings only makes the nightmare more fearful, for after dozens of workshops at countless conventions, the only thing anyone can say for sure is that they do not know where the awful sounds of gunfire will next echo down the hallways and in the classrooms.

But no one I knew or any of the workshops ever talked about the possibility of the equivalent of a Columbine occurring at a college. Every school district in the country has detailed policies in place if it ever happened to them. Their teachers, administrators and staff are trained in what to do and local law enforcement officials participate in the planning and the drills.

Now that it has happened at a college they, too, will have to undergo similar training and create similar plans. Campuses will seem less safe, new rules and drills will need to be implemented and college officials and teachers will now understand the nightmares of their secondary colleagues.

At the center of that nightmare lies a dark, bottomless pool. As with the Columbines of this country, people will stare into the pool seeking answers. Some will see reflections and try to generalize from them about the nature of the shooter and the victims, but the reflections they see will only be their own. Interest groups will look into the pool and see their causes, filling the talk shows with spokespersons who will say that if we had only done "x" the event would have never happened. Others will take a longer view trying to peer into the depths of the pool seeking confirmation of trends historical, social and psychological. They too will see only their own reflections.

For those at the center of it all, the parents, relatives and friends of the victims and the shooter, those who witnessed it and lived, and those who somehow made a decision to not go to those places at that time the pool will seem more like a maelstrom in which they are caught and cannot get out. Spinning helplessly they will try to maintain some sort of equilibrium, some rationality to keep from drowning in it all. For some this may mean just focusing on the immediate, the details of that which has to be done and it is only days, weeks, even months after that a delayed reaction will overcome them.

To help them survive the maelstrom the college will bring in the teams of counselors whose jobs are to somehow get everyone through this. Going in they know theirs represents a task akin to diving into that bottomless pool and seeking to build something solid. They will work miracles with some and experience heartache with others. Each case will be different, but will they will also hear the echoes of past times like this and try to somehow connect them with what now faces them.

Our country will experience yet another crack in its marble-like structure. And it too will become part of that pool if we let it. But staring into the pool accomplishes nothing, breeding only frustration, despair and even anger. The dark pool will beckon us with its siren songs to stare into its depths or even dive in.

Instead we need to turn away from the pool and remember that at least for a brief tick in time all of us will be as one, united with those Hokies at Virginia Tech into a collective version of Hokie Nation. For now is not a time for politics or debates or even business as usual. Instead families and communities need to realize how fleeting order and life can be and hug one another because that is all they can do. This time as with all those other times we will pledge to love one another a little more and show it. We will swear not to hate and to watch out for those stray souls who slip between the cracks only to emerge from those dark places with guns in their hands. Perhaps this time we can make that oneness last longer.

Perhaps we can remember that kind words can conquer hate and vitriol. Perhaps we can remember to succor the meek, the powerless, the people who have been dealt a bum hand through no fault of their own. Perhaps we can remember that in situations like the Virginia Tech shootings that we are in fact all equal, that it could have been any one of us who died or knew someone who died and yes who knew the shooter, for death recognizes no classes, no races, no languages or cultures as superior. Most of all we can try to nurture that feeling that all of us struggle to feel right now, that feeling of empathy with other human beings we did not know before and whose friends and family we somehow each wish we could help.

Posted by liberalamerican

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Original Source: <a href="http://thestrangedeathofliberalamerica.com/2007/04/16/in-memoriam-virginia-tech-april-16-2007/">http://thestrangedeathofliberalamerica.com/2007/04/16/in-memoriam-virginia-tech-april-16-2007/</a>

Licensed under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported</a>.

Ralph Brauer

2007-06-08

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported

eng

Virginia Tech Redux: Did the Old Media Lose it in Blacksburg?

<p>April 18th, 2007</p>
<p>As the words continue to flow along with the tears after the deaths at Virginia Tech, one important observation rises above the ruins: the incident represented a triumph for what the pundits term the New Media over the Old. The keys to this triumph lie in the strengths of the New Media: its immediacy, diversity, and ability to speak personally.</p>
<p>The immediacy of the New Media put them far ahead of the Old Media even as the crisis unfolded. The on-campus emails that first informed many students that something terrible had happened became like pebbles dropped in a pond, rippling out into the ether. New Media such as Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and search engines became the preferred sources for people desperate to find out what happened. Probably the most dramatic illustration of this was the group of students who fled to the library and then frantically searched the Internet to find out what was happening. A decade ago they might have turned on the radio or television.</p>
<p>Even the Old Media had to acknowledge the role the New Media played for the students at Virginia Tech. CBS ran a <a target="_blank" href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/04/17/the_skinny/main2693331.shtml">story</a> "Students Turn To Web In Time Of Tragedy" whose sub head read, "How the Internet Helped Va. Tech Students Cope with Shooting Massacre." The <em>Los Angeles Times</em> <a target="_blank" href="http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fi-web17apr17,1,3926754,full.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage">reported </a>about University of Southern California sophomore Charlotte Korchak who instead of using a cellphone to check on friends at Virginia Tech, immediately went to Facebook.</p>
<blockquote>"I was able to immediately find out who was OK," she said. "Without Facebook, I have no idea how I would have found that out."</blockquote>
<p>As for the news on campus, the Old Media struggled to catch up. National Public Radio even published a desperate-sounding plea on their web site for witnesses of the tragedy to please contact them so they could line up interviews. In short, in the first few hours after the shootings the Old Media became just like the rest of us, searching the web for information and answers.</p>
<p>Later National Public Radio would <a target="_blank" href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/talk/index.html">gloat</a>, its words a bit of an unnecessary distortion (i.e. many bloggers), on the misinformation posted on some blogs. Referring to a Wired post the NPR blog stated:</p>
<blockquote>Wired reports that many bloggers originally <a href="http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/04/internet_names_.html">misidentified the shooter</a> in yesterday&#39;s rampage at Virginia Tech, linking to "to the LiveJournal blog of a particular 23-year-old gun nut in Virginia." It turned out that this person was not connected to the shootings.</blockquote>
<p>However, the zealotry of some blogging wingnuts pales beside the old media&#39;s inability to even get the name of the institution correct. Most of them resorted to the shorthand Virginia Tech. It wasn&#39;t until a day after the shootings that the New York Times published the official name of the school-Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. As for misidentifying the killer, there were also many false reports in the Old Media, which at one time speculated the shootings at the two different buildings might not be related.</p>
<p>Others in the Old Media recognized the role the New Media played in getting the story out. The Los Angeles Times <a target="_blank" href="http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fi-web17apr17,1,3926754,full.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage&ctrack=1&cset=true">admitted</a>:</p>
<blockquote>Members of the most wired generation in history dealt with Monday&#39;s bloody rampage by connecting on blogs, Facebook and other websites. Their eyewitness descriptions, photos and video made the trauma unfolding in the rural Virginia town immediate and visceral to millions.</blockquote>
<p>The Hartford Courant also <a target="_blank" href="http://www.courant.com/chi-0704160582apr17,0,7614531,print.story">acknowledged</a>:</p>
<blockquote>the most arresting coverage from Virginia Tech came from citizen journalists who went to work well before the media could grasp the massacre&#39;s full scope.</blockquote>
<p>The reliance of the Old Media on the New gave rise to a host of stories with the following disclaimer, "[this network, newspaper, radio station] is not responsible for the content of external Internet sites." Those in the Old Media who won out in the rush to tap into local sources were those like CNN who have consciously solicited the work of citizen journalists. The Hartford Courant <a target="_blank" href="http://www.courant.com/chi-0704160582apr17,0,7614531,print.story">pointed out</a> student Jamal Albarghouti, whose cell phone camera pictures were among the first of the massacre:</p>
<blockquote>Was one of more than 100 so-called I-Reporters to submit Virginia Tech content to CNN. Once CNN realized what it had, it paid him an undisclosed amount of money for exclusivity, limiting other networks to no more than 10 seconds of the clip.</blockquote>
<p>Some students became weary of all the attention as the Old Media desperately searched for someone, anyone who could give them an interview. One Virginia Tech blogger (in keeping with his request to limit intrusions I will not link to his site here but a secondary source) <a target="_blank" href="http://blogher.org/node/18346">wrote</a>:</p>
<blockquote>As of the time I am writing this I have done a radio interview with BBC and talked with a reporter from the LA Times. CBC Newsworld, the Boston Herald, Current TV, and MTV have asked for interviews and further information. As I said I intend to share my experiences with everyone, but I want to reinstate that I am just an average student and I don&#39;t want to be made into something I am not.</blockquote>
<p>The Old Media have no one but themselves to blame for not having reporters near the scene. For more than two decades they have been furiously pursuing a policy that has concentrated radio and television stations and newspapers into fewer and fewer hands. The changes in media concentration first proposed by the FCC in 2003 essentially would have allowed a single company to control almost half of all broadcasting stations and, more important, two companies could control 90%. It also raised the caps on how many local stations could be controlled by a single company and widened the ability of companies to engage in cross-media ownership within a single market.</p>
<p>What this has meant is the steady decline of local media and the Old Media. An online check of Blacksburg showed that essentially Virginia Tech itself was probably the main local media. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.city-data.com/city/Blacksburg-Virginia.html">City-data.com</a> lists five radio stations actually in Blacksburg. One of them is owned by a national chain, Capstar TX Limited Partnerships and three are owned by what seem to be regional corporations. Only one appears to be locally owned - the FM station owned by Virginia Tech.</p>
<p>This leaves the networks and newspapers without any local media they can instantly tap into. They have to rely on the Internet just like the rest of us. In essence the networks have no one to call. This phenomenon is happening all over the country as local media voices disappear forever. In <em>The Strange Death of Liberal America</em> I wrote:</p>
<blockquote>Control of local markets by national conglomerates gives local citizens little information about their own community. In a way, many towns become . . . [media] ghost towns with only tumbleweeds howling through them and their vibrant down towns boarded up. Along with the loss of local voices comes the loss of venerable institutions like the broadcasts of the local sports teams, local personalities dishing out tips on canning this year�s tomato crop, and that lifeblood of many rural communities, the recitation of the current commodity prices. In a sense, conglomerates such as Clear Channel not only make people anonymous, they also make their communities anonymous.</blockquote>
<p>The New Media have helped to fill this gap, rushing into the vacuum created by the loss of local voices. As the <em>Washington Post</em> <a target="_blank" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/16/AR2007041601834.html?hpid=topnews">noted,</a></p>
<blockquote>Blacksburg, lead by Virginia Tech, is home to the Blacksburg Electronic Village, a pioneering project launched in the mid-&#39;90s that sought to link everyone in an online community. A Reader&#39;s Digest headline in 1996 called Blacksburg "The Most Wired Town in America."</blockquote>
<p>For Blacksburg, replacing the Old Media with the New was a move that, as we have seen, paid off during the massacre. It is difficult to speculate what the consequences of the shootings would have been without the New Media, but clearly on the Virginia Tech campus alone, the New Media performed a variety of crucial functions in linking fellow Hokies. If we then move to the level of the friends and family of those at Virginia Tech, without the New Media they might have suffered a great deal more agony. An online <em>Post link </em><a target="_blank" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/16/AR2007041601834.html?hpid=topnews">observed</a>,</p>
<blockquote>Friends and family embrace the New Media to get the message out.</blockquote>
<p>It was in the second and third areas - the personal and the diverse - that the New Media really excelled. The Internet allowed those at Virginia Tech and those with close ties to it to quickly link to one another and form an online community of grief. For the rest of us the Internet performed a similar function as blogs, chatrooms, online audio and video allowed us to link with each other and to those at Virginia Tech.</p>
<p>Now that the Old Media finally have their satellite trucks in place and have flown down their big name reporters to Blacksburg, they again appear in control. Once again their pious pronouncements and portentous analysis fill the airwaves. They desperately want to tell us how to think and feel about this tragedy. They seem almost eager to fill in the missing whys.</p>
<p>The Old Media still have not learned an old lesson, one as old as the Kennedy Assassination, that event that was their first national moment, the first time they had us all glued to the glowing screens. Then they kept their voices soft and restrained and let the pictures tell the story.</p>
<p>Now the Old Media broadcast events like the Virginia Tech shootings as if they were sports contests complete with the play-by-play person talking too much by telling us what we are seeing along with the resident experts pontificating about what it all means. And of course they manage to sign up a few "witnesses" who soon become THE voices of the tragedy-and, of course, each network tries to get exclusive contracts with them, trampling over the poor students in their zeal to find the most articulate, photogenic and dramatic. Then they ask the inevitable question, whether for the NCAA Final Four winner or a student at Virginia Tech is: "How do you feel?"</p>
<p>In contrast in the New Media, as the cliche goes, everyone can be themselves. Instead of pat answers and telegenic witnesses you find reality. We all know reality can be chaotic, it can be messy and it can be downright obnoxious. It has no pat answers, no resident experts and no one cares what you look like or sound like or even if you are articulate. In the New Media there is the feeling that anyone close to such a tragedy who sounds articulate is suspect.</p>
<p>The power of the New Media lies in its diversity. But what makes it powerful also has its dark side. You will find no shortage of rantings in various blogs that put even Fox News to shame. In fact right now unseemly discussions are raging all across the blogsphere like a tsunami of BS over who is to blame for this, whether we should or should not have gun control and the cryptic note the killer left behind.</p>
<p>But to have diversity we must be willing to accept the garbage along with the wisdom, even if sometimes it seems the smell of the garbage is enough to make you puke. if you are willing to hold your nose and look hard enough you will also find analysis that both moves you and provides you with more information and more unusual slants than you will ever find in the Old Media.</p>
<p>Clearly part of the attention and volume of comments the shootings have precipitated lies not merely with their horrific nature, but with the sense that many have that the massacre signaled something major had shifted in America. The seismic shock, the huge spike in online activity registered by blogs such as this one, signifies that a new world is being born, one in which the New Media have become the preferred means of communication and information. That the New Media are less reliable and more chaotic than the old has some people worried, especially in the Old Media.</p>
<p>In many ways the situation with media mirrors the murders at Virginia Tech, for just as the shootings now have made all of us a bit less certain about our safety, so have the New Media made us a bit less certain about our information. We have entered one of those uncertain and exciting times where an old world is dying and a new one is being born.</p>
<p>It may take a generation or two before the situation sorts itself out just as it did with previous media changes. As we weather these changes we need to remember that above all, the New Media is about connections and diversity, two things the Old Media lost sight of a long time ago.</p>
<p>So, in the days ahead I hope those of you who found this post will wander on to others. Above all, I hope you will make new connections, find interesting voices, and perhaps even bump into some uncomfortable ideas. For unlike the Old Media, the New Media is organic, almost a living thing, because it changes and evolves even as I write this.</p>
<p>Posted by liberalamerican</p>
<p>--</p>
<p>Original Source: <a href="http://thestrangedeathofliberalamerica.com/2007/04/18/virginia-tech-redux-did-the-old-media-lose-it-in-blacksburg/">http://thestrangedeathofliberalamerica.com/2007/04/18/virginia-tech-redux-did-the-old-media-lose-it-in-blacksburg/</a></p>
<p>Licensed under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported</a>.</p>

Ralph Brauer

2007-06-08

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported

eng

Blacksburg, violence, and America

Published by <a href="http://davesmidlife.com/author/admin/">Dave </a> April 25th, 2007

I have been on the sidelines of quite a number of handgun deaths in my life. Thank God, I haven&#39;t really been in the crossfire, nor has any member of my family. But gun violence has come close enough to me to be very unsettling.

In the late 1980s, when I was a graduate student in German at Vanderbilt, a German exchange student, <a href="http://www.vanderbilt.edu/isss/weser_award.html">Thomas Weser</a>, was gunned down in a parking lot on campus in the very early morning hours. The murder seemed to be a robbery gone wrong. It became a murder because the mugger had a handgun.

On Christmas Eve 1991, I was living in the Belmont Heights section of Nashville, a cozy suburban neighborhood near several university campuses. My kids were very young. We got along well with our neighbors. There were families all around us.

Diagonally across the street from us lived two brothers. They got into an argument in the middle of the night after much alcohol had been drunk. One brother fetched a loaded handgun and killed the other. Without the loaded handgun in the house, this argument would probably have remained a drunken fistfight, maybe a stabbing.

In February of 1997, our family accompanied my wife on a weekend trip to New York City. My wife had to attend an arts conference, and I was left to explore the city with the kids. On Sunday afternoon we wanted to go to the observation deck of the Empire State Building, but we weren&#39;t sure whether we should wait until Mom got finished with her afternoon meeting. We decided that I would go ahead and take the kids up to the top while Barbara was in her session.

After we returned home to Northern Virginia, we learned that <a href="http://www.cnn.com/US/9702/24/empire.shooting/index.html">a man had opened fire</a> with a handgun on the Empire State Building&#39;s observation deck later that afternoon. Seven people were shot; one was killed, in addition to the gunman, who committed suicide. If we had waited for Barbara, we might well have been there to experience the shooting firsthand. <a href="http://www.cnn.com/US/9702/24/empire.shoot/">Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani blamed weak gun laws</a> for the rampage.

America&#39;s latest adventure in easily available firearms is, of course, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_massacre">massacre at Virginia Tech</a>. As I have <a href="http://davesmidlife.com/2007/04/18/blacksburg/">mentioned</a>, my wife and daughter, who had visited Blacksburg the day before, missed this one by about 18 hours.

The world press paid close attention to this shooting for a long time. It was front-page news in just about all the newspapers of the world for four or five days. As I write this, nine days after the attack, major papers in <a href="http://www.sueddeutsche.de">Germany</a>, <a href="http://derstandard.at/?id=2854321">Austria</a>, <a href="http://www.lemonde.fr/web/recherche_breve/1,13-0,37-986031,0.html">France</a>, and other countries are still reporting the aftermath.

The one thing the world press has emphasized, without exception, is their absolute bafflement at the U.S. gun laws-or lack thereof. We are the laughingstock of the world in this department. People from civilized countries around the world look at the apparent American fascination with guns and cluck in disapproving astonishment. The unifying theme is something like this: how can a great country such as the U.S., the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, continue to allow this to happen?

After all these years and decades, I cannot come up with an answer. The National Rifle Association seems to have our congressional legislators in a deathgrip. One mass murder happens after another, all carried out with handguns or assault rifles, and yet nothing changes.

The morning after the Virginia Tech shootings, I heard Washington Post sports reporter <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Feinstein">John Feinstein</a> on <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/wtwpradio/index.html">WTWP</a>. I wish I could find a transcript of his remarks. Essentially what he said was this: when gun owners and gun fans complain about the inconvenience or unfairness of having to register these deadly weapons, he is sick of hearing about it. Since 9/11 we have been subject to a series of ever more humiliating and inconvenient searches of our persons and property at airports. Nobody really complains, because that&#39;s just the way the world is.

Well, the world is also selling deadly handguns on the Internet to psychotic young men, who then commit mass murder. Couldn&#39;t we endure just a little inconvenience to combat such madness?

I am very angry now at our American stupidity. I am angry at the weak will of the majority of Americans who want stronger gun controls, yet who will not raise hell with their congressmen or senators about it. I am embarrassed to have to try to explain to my European friends and colleagues why Americans are still allowed to buy and carry handguns.

The <a href="http://www.gocomics.com/patoliphant/2007/04/19/">cartoonist Pat Oliphant</a> has captured my sense of befuddlement and rage.

--

Original Source: <a href="http://davesmidlife.com/2007/04/25/blacksburg-violence-and-america/">http://davesmidlife.com/2007/04/25/blacksburg-violence-and-america/</a>

This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License</a>.

Dave Shepherd

2007-06-08

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5

eng

You vs. MSM in Va Tech Shooting Coverage

by <a href="http://members.nowpublic.com/brock">brock</a> | April 23, 2007 at 08:21 pm

As the terrible story of the shootings on the Virginia Tech campus began to unfold last week, the tens of thousands of moving pieces that make up the main stream media were kicked into high gear. The effort to get reporters "on the ground" and "in the face" of those on campus is startling in its breadth and depth.

As you see below, <b>the Washington Post threw no less than 75 reporters</b> at the story!! That is stunning. And when further reading the piece, <i>there was concern among the editors on the Post</i> because it was <i>too windy to charter a private plane to fly their reporters</i> to the Va Tech campus.

And then there was you, citizen journalist, crowd sourcing the story from any angle. NowPublic was fielding eye-witness accounts and sifting through rumors in real-time mode; ethical discussions about what information was appropriate to release and when (NowPublic had the name of the shooter&#39;s first victim very early on, perhaps before the main stream media knew) it was appropriate to do so.

The crew at NowPublic handled the chaos with grace and style and sensitivity and with more coolness and level heads than I&#39;ve seen in major newsrooms during breaking stories. And they did with a fraction of the resources at the command of media outlets like the Washington Post or NBC News. And they did a more than commendable job.

What&#39;s the point? Simply this: that effort couldn&#39;t have happened without <i><b>YOU</b></i>, the citizen journalist. I&#39;ve talked to many about citizen driven journalism or "crowd sourcing," whatever you want to call it, and many people I talk to ask "what&#39;s the use?" especially when there are places like the Washington Post throwing 75 people at the story. But that&#39;s exactly the point: with all the resources available to all of you, all of your friends and their friends... citizen journalism can be (should be) a force to be reckoned with. But it starts with you; <b>you gotta believe in this</b>... and then just jump in.

<b>Point, click...National News Story</b>

In a follow-on segment to this piece that I&#39;ll have in a couple of days, I&#39;m going to lay out to you a case-study in "How to Hack the Media," and by that I mean how you, sitting at home, in your office, in the park, at Starbucks or <i>on a beach in Nicaragua</i> can break a story and have the likes of CNN, the Los Angeles Times and FOX News all chasing after your story.

Yes, it&#39;s true and it&#39;s almost too easy. I&#39;ll lay it out for you step-by-step, complete with a fresh example, using the story I broke a couple of weeks ago while knocking back some local brews in the sleepy little fishing village of San Juan Del Sur, Nicaragua.

<i>Stay Tuned...</i>

--

Original Source: Brock N. Meeks / NowPublic.com
<a href="http://www.nowpublic.com/you_vs_msm_in_va_tech_shooting_coverage">http://www.nowpublic.com/you_vs_msm_in_va_tech_shooting_coverage</a>

Brock N. Meeks

null

2007-06-07

Brent Jesiek

null

eng

too much coverage of the Virginia Tech tragedy

<b>April 19, 2007</b>

The amount of coverage has been staggering--dozens of stories per day in the top national newspapers, nightly broadcast news programs that are lengthened by half an hour, 24-hour repetitions of the same information on cable news, even a blow-by-blow account in the "Kid&#39;s Post" section of the <i>Washington Post</i>, which my 7-year-old reads. I first found out about the Blacksburg tragedy because a student TV news crew stopped me on the street to ask my opinion. This is a global phenomenon: <i>Le Monde</i> and the BBC also led with Cho Seung-hui&#39;s picture when I looked.

It&#39;s a choice to devote so much space and time to those 33 deaths. Bombers killed 158 in US-occupied Baghdad on Wednesday. Nigeria, the biggest country in Africa, saw violence connected to its presidential vote. Comparisons are odious; they imply that one doesn&#39;t care about <i>particular </i>victims and that human lives can be counted and weighed. I do sympathize with the Blacksburg victims and their families. I sympathize because I have been told their stories in detail; but there are many other stories that I could have been told--other tragedies, or (for that matter) other narratives that are important but not tragic.

Perhaps the Virginia Tech victims deserve sympathy from all of us, but I suspect they would prefer <i>less</i> attention. I find it hard to see how the deserve something they don&#39;t want.

One reason to tell the Virginia Tech story in detail is to provide us with the information we might need to act as voters and members of various communities. For instance, I work at a university much like Virginia Tech and could agitate for new policies in my institution. But it is generally a bad idea to act on the basis of extremely rare events. There have been about 40 mass shootings in the USA. During the period when those crimes have occurred, something like half a billion total people have been alive in America. That means that 0.000008 percent of the population commits mass shootings. There cannot be a general circumstance that explains why someone does something so rare. The availability of weapons, mental illness, video games--none of these prevalent factors can "explain" something that in 99.999992 percent of cases does <im>not</i> happen. (Bayes&#39; theorem seems relevant here, but I cannot precisely say why.)

It is foolish to use such rare events to make policy at any level--from federal laws to school rules. For instance, if lots of people carried concealed weapons, there is some chance that the next mass killer would be stopped after he had shot some of his victims. But millions of people would have to carry guns, and that would cause all kinds of other consequences. The day after the Blacksburg killings, two highly trained Secret Service officers <a href="http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,21577408-954,00.html">were injured</a> on the White House grounds because one of them accidentally discharged his gun. Imagine how many times such accidents would happen per year if most ordinary college students packed weapons in order to prevent the next Blacksburg.

The last paragraph was a rebuttal to those who want to use Cho Seung-hui as an argument for carrying concealed weapons. But it would be equally mistaken to favor gun <i>control </i>because it might prevent mass shootings. Maybe gun control is a good idea, but not because it would somewhat lower the probability of staggeringly rare events. Its other consequences (both positive and negative) are much more significant.

If obsessive coverage of a particular tragedy does not help us to govern ourselves or make wise policies, it does reduce our sense of security and trust. It reinforces our belief that "current events" and "public affairs" are mostly about senseless acts of violence. It plants the idea that one can become spectacularly famous by killing other people. These are not positive consequences.

It is moving that some students have started a "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/19/arts/19scre.html">reach out to a loner</a>" campaign on the Internet. They are trying to respond constructively to something that they have been told is highly important. Imagine what they might accomplish if they turned their attention to the prison population, the high-school dropout problem, or even ordinary mental illness.

Posted by peterlevine at April 19, 2007 8:40 PM

--

Original Source: <a href="http://www.peterlevine.ws/mt/archives/2007/04/too-much-covera.html">http://www.peterlevine.ws/mt/archives/2007/04/too-much-covera.html</a>

This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License</a>.

Peter Levine

2007-06-07

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5

eng

The vanity of reason: making sense of the Virginia Tech tragedy

Gene Koo - Thursday, April 19th, 2007 @ 5:52 pm

Soon after an initial outpouring of shock and grief at the senseless murder of 32 members of the Virginia Tech community, we began seeking explanations for the tragedy. By all accounts Seung-Hui Cho, perpetrator and 33rd victim of this rampage, was a severely disturbed young man; the snippets of video released so far by NBC reveal profound paranoia. Inevitably our questions turn to what would lead him to commit such a heinous crime. We yearn for insight into his motives. Why did he do it? What was he thinking?

These questions are familiar to me. I have asked them myself about my own mother, who probably developed paranoid schizophrenia some 15 years ago. I write "probably" because, like water filling a tub, the disease crept over her, imperceptibly, until suddenly it spilled forth in a flood. And somewhere in that tub, the loving woman who had been my mother drowned.

I cannot know, but looking at the face in the video aired by NBC, I would guess that the real Seung-Hui Cho, someone capable of the kind of laughter and anger you and I would understand, perished long before he pulled the trigger on himself.

People of sound mind often assume that individuals with mental illness think like we do: therefore, they must be misinformed, wrong-headed, or just pretending. We are, essentially, in denial. We delude ourselves into believing that we can figure these people out, and in so doing, learn how to "fix" them. In the first few years of my mother&#39;s illness, I challenged her claims that the "Chinese mafia" were spying on and stealing from her. Using lawyer&#39;s logic, I repeatedly demonstrated why it made no sense for criminals to go to such great lengths to inflict such petty wounds upon her.

She would always win these fights, because madness is not susceptible to reason. What I lacked in communicating with her was not logic, but rather imagination.

--

"Did you want to inject as much misery in our lives as you can," asks Mr. Cho in one video segment, "just because you can?" My mother asks these sorts of questions, too. She believes that clerks at the local store overcharge her and divert the money to her oppressors. Pedestrians stare at and spy on her. (The first part, at least, is now true due to her disheveled clothing and behavior). Vandals break into her home and move her papers around to prevent her from working. The invisible device in my ear tells her I am aiding and abetting "them."

These ludicrous accusations infuriated me, but my logical counterattacks could not breach the walls around her mind. Exhausted, I learned to stop fighting her reality and to accept that she truly believes what she says. Only through imagination - a willing suspension of disbelief - could I see her world.

A few years ago my mother was driving her brother around town when she unexpectedly pulled over so that the three black town cars following them would drive past. There was no one behind them, my uncle reports. But I no longer doubt that she indeed saw, in her mind, enemy agents in hostile pursuit.

--

In responding to the tragic massacre Mr. Cho wrought, the public seeks criminal intent, a "motive." The media presume they can understand and explain him; the FBI believes the hateful package sent to NBC will shed insight into his motivations. I have given up that quest. The search is vanity, a misplaced faith in reason.

Our criminal justice system assumes we can peer into mens rea, the criminal mind, and presumably extract thoughts and motives. Mental illness and the "insanity plea" have never fit well into this system because crimes committed by the mentally ill defy reason - and reason, it turns out, underlies our concept of justice. Like Job&#39;s entourage, our pundits and lawyers see tragedy and deduce the presence of sin. For if there is justice on Earth, then evil must have a logical human cause.

But we cannot seek solace in reason when dealing with mental illness. My mother is as logical as you or I, maybe more so. Her stratagems for thwarting the spies and thieves and vandals who plague her life are subtle, cunning, and carefully executed. The only piece out of place is that you and I cannot see these tormenters. They are entirely in her own mind.

--

Insanity is not stupidity, incompetence, or folly. Neither should we confuse it with evil. An important factor distinguishes my mother from Mr. Cho: while she manifests her paranoia through fear, he chose mass murder.

Or is "choice" a concept that we cannot ascribe to Mr. Cho? Perhaps one day science will answer that question, reveal the origins of madness, and demonstrate which faulty wires put voices in my mother&#39;s head, or what lethal mix of hormones induced Mr. Cho to massacre. Science may yet strip the fa���§ade of free will from every one of us, revealing nothing but seething masses of neurons. And we would be farther than ever from finding the source of evil.

Lawyers have a formula for calculating guilt that accounts for mitigations like provocation or insanity. That formula may be readjusted now and then, but its ultimate function is to balance the equation of justice and ensure that criminal debts are paid. But we cannot so easily cancel the pain we all feel when a man guns down innocents, or when a mother neglects her family. It is more than the pain of our immediate loss. We suffer because we are separated from mortal understanding; we have peered over the edge of reason and seen the whirlwind beyond.

--

Original Source: <a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/anderkoo/2007/04/19/the-vanity-of-reason-making-sense-of-the-virginia-tech-tragedy/">Anderkoo - The vanity of reason</a>

Permissions: <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/">CreativeCommons-Attribution-Sharealike 2.5</a>

Gene Koo

2007-06-07

Sara Hood

CreativeCommons-Attribution-Sharealike 2.5

eng

Cho Seung-Hui: A Lone Deranged Gunman?

<p>Thursday, April 19. 2007</p>
<p>As all of America mourns the deaths which occurred on the Virginia Tech campus, bloggers are drawing comparisons to the body count that issues daily from Iraq. See a particularly poignant post from Floyd Rudmin of <b>commondreams.org</b> titled "32 Senseless Deaths: A Chance for Empathy, Change of Heart, and Change of Course" which concludes:</p>
<blockquote>The tragedy at Virginia Tech was caused by lone gunman, probably deranged. It was a one-time event. It is finished. The tragedy in Iraq was caused by the US government, with the over-whelming support of the US Congress, most of the US media, and much of the US population. This war was planned and executed by rational men and women, none of them deranged.</blockquote>
<blockquote>The US decided to start the war against Iraq.</blockquote>
<blockquote>The US decided to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq.</blockquote>
<blockquote>The US decided to destroy the Iraqi government and to disband its police and army.</blockquote>
<blockquote>The US decided to send too few soldiers to secure the nation after doing these destructive deeds.</blockquote>
<blockquote>And the tragedy of Iraq is not a one-time event. It is not finished. It continues, apparently without end.</blockquote>
<blockquote>By many reports, the US is now preparing to start another war, this time against Iran.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Americans feeling the shock and grief of the tragedy at Virginia Tech should look into their hearts and realize that they through their government are bringing this same tragedy again, and again, and again, and again, and again, endlessly and needlessly, to other people in the world who also have hearts that can be torn out, who also feel grief and loss when family and friends are suddenly killed when doing ordinary things of life, like going to school.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Tragic deaths force us to feel our humanity and to see we are similar to others in the world. The tragic deaths in Virginia might serve to motivate Americans to curb their militarism and to minimize the tragedies of sudden death that they have been bringing to other families in the world.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Read the <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/18/593/">full article</a>.</blockquote>
<p>It is heartening to witness a vigorous debate emerging online as people come to terms with these killings and their significance, not only for the victims and their families and friends, but for an entire culture. As Americans draw comparisons to Iraq, we who are not American are reminded that America is a house divided. I sometimes catch myself drawing hasty generalizations, styling all Americans as arrogant war-mongerers. But the comments I read online remind me that, in fact, those who share the president&#39;s world view stand in a minority. I must pause to recognize that most Americans grieve for the state of their country and fear for their safety abroad. As non-Americans, our generalizations merely implicate us in the sins we condemn.</p>
<p>Perhaps a more difficult task comes in moderating the generalizations we make as we consider Cho Seung-Hui who was the perpetrator of these killings. Every account I have read thus far refers to him as "deranged." Doubtless a person who commits mass murder is mentally ill. But the use of this particular epithet continues the media habit of drawing a causal connection between violence and mental illness. This is an oversimplification, much like the suggestion that American troops are in Iraq to stabilize a country that has no infrastructure of its own.</p>
<p>The media&#39;s continuing association of violence and mental illness perpetuates the stigma which haunts millions of people who suffer from major mental health issues. In fact, mental illness is <b>not</b> a significant indicator of violence. See this pdf document from the <a href="http://theoblog.ca/serendipity/archives/www.camh.net/education/Resources_communities_organizations/addressing_stigma_senatepres03.pdf">Centre for Addiction and Mental Health</a>. Indicators which are more significant include: youth, male gender, and history of violence or substance abuse. Let me make that a little clearer: if you are a male, that fact alone is a stronger predictor of violent behaviour than if you suffer from schizophrenia. A non-clinical list of indicators might also include such factors as availability of weapons and exposure to desensitizing materials (e.g. video games, movies, media that televise a killer&#39;s manifesto and cell phone video of shots being fired, etc). From the CAMH document comes this quote:</p>
<blockquote>"While it is true that some people who have a mental illness do commit crimes, public perceptions of mentally ill persons as criminally dangerous are exaggerated. In fact, 80 to 90 percent of people with mental illness never commit violent acts. <i>They are actually more likely to have acts of violence committed against them</i>, particularly homeless individuals who may also have a mental illness." (Italics added.)</blockquote>
<p>If the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violent acts, then it is possible that Cho Seung-Hui only became a risk <i>after</i> he was, himself, victimized. Following the shootings at Columbine, it was revealed that the shooters, Harris & Klebold, were victims of significant bullying. The same is probably true in this instance. See here for a <a href="http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070416/school_shootings_070415">profile of Cho</a>.</p>
<p>Let&#39;s not perpetrate a generalization about mental illness. Let&#39;s seize this moment as an opportunity to put an end to a cycle of violence by putting an end to our fears of mental illness. I would invite Floyd Rudmin and <b>commondreams.org</b> to revise their post. There were 33 senseless deaths. To state that there were 32 reveals a stigmatizing bias that we must reckon with. Otherwise, our generalizations merely implicate us in the sins we condemn.</p>
<p>Posted by <a href="http://theoblog.ca/serendipity/authors/1-David-Barker">David Barker</a> in <a href="http://theoblog.ca/serendipity/categories/8-HealthMental-Health">Health/Mental Health</a> at <a href="http://theoblog.ca/serendipity/archives/248-Cho-Seung-Hui-A-Lone-Deranged-Gunman.html">23:08</a></p>
<p>--</p>
<p>Original Source: <a href="http://theoblog.ca/serendipity/archives/248-Cho-Seung-Hui-A-Lone-Deranged-Gunman.html">http://theoblog.ca/serendipity/archives/248-Cho-Seung-Hui-A-Lone-Deranged-Gunman.html</a></p>
<p>Licensed under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5</a>.</p>

David Barker

2007-06-06

Brent Jesiek

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Could the Virginia Tech shooting been avoided?

<a href="http://www.groundreport.com/Queenbee7519">Nafeesah Abdullah</a>
May 06, 2007

In light of recent events this just gets added to the list of school shootings that have taken place over the last 5+ years and what seems to be motive is identical the perpetrators are young white males under the age of 21 with a history of disturbing behavior either expressed through writing or other means like music, video games, and artwork. This situation took a small turn since the perpetrator was a 23 year old Asian (Korean) male. The loner mentality wasn&#39;t anything new because the two guys at Columbine also were loners too and the other perpetrators of past school shootings were also loners too with family issues.

As a former college RA I have experienced students who are not as social as others, but I made it my responsibility to check in with my residents just to let them know I am there for them if they needed anything even someone to talk to. You got some RA&#39;s who are in the job just for the perks, but are not true to the job of being a student leader and someone who is held to standards to uphold and adhere to the job and what it entails. RA&#39;s need to be retrained to understand that they are in a position to serve students and to exercise their skills as a student leader, and having a more personal approach to how they interact with students.

Most students who tend to be loners don&#39;t have a lot of friends and usually are the butt of people&#39;s jokes for being strange or weird and just plain dysfunctional. The RA who was among the victims of this horrific crime didn&#39;t deserve what he got, but this should be a wake up call to RA&#39;s who treat students like they don&#39;t matter. This should be a wake up call to students and teachers period that if you recognize someone who tends to be a loner to speak up because this can stop the violence in schools and it&#39;s not just college, but in grade and high schools everywhere. Students don&#39;t want to feel that they&#39;re ratting someone out, but would they rather tell on someone who&#39;s like this than to be the target of their anger and aggression when it builds up to the point that it hits the breaking point? This is where we have to take action, and not wait until something happens for us to do something about the problem. Columbine should have not happened, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold&#39;s parents should have taken note of what their sons&#39; teachers and counselors said about the disturbing behavior and maybe then something could have been done and the shootings would have not happened.

It took a sad tragedy like what happened at Virginia Tech for people to recognize that the mentality of those who tend to spend time alone can be dangerous. For some of us who are attending college as undergrads and graduate students we should be able to feel safe on the campuses that we are attending classes at, and we shouldn&#39;t have to worry about some student who&#39;s disturbed who&#39;s got issues taking their anger out on innocent people.Innocent lives were senselessly lost due to a student&#39;s silent anger, and when it was made public by his English professor that his writing assignments were of pedophilia and murder should have tipped off the university that this student has issues and should have been treated as such.

Are school administrations planning to take teachers and counselors seriously when they bring to their attention reports of a student(s) erratic and disturbing behavior where it involves some kind of harm to people or things or even committing acts of violence against a certain group of people or gender? There&#39;s got to be some accountability on a school&#39;s part to address these matters whether it&#39;s a student in grade/high school or even college. Students should be inspired to take even more action since peers are key to recognizing things among their own peers. If this was a team effort between fellow students and teachers this can lessen future incidents from happening.This is where schools need to up the ante and make people aware that those who are mentally ill are unpredictable.

This runs along the line of Laurie Dann who was a mentally ill woman then 32 years old who went on a shooting spree and shot up 15 students and two teachers at Hubbard Woods elementary school in Glencoe, Illinois. The media frenzy was so bad that Laurie&#39;s parents had immediately sold their home and relocated to Florida to escape the press who would surround their house to get a response from them. They were at a loss for words because they didn&#39;t think their daughter was capable of doing such a thing until the media revealed that she was a paranoid schizophrenic and a manic depressant.

The Columbine incident should have never happened either and this was due in part that Eric Harris was noted to taking the anti-psychotic medication Luvox as part of his anger management therapy which may have contributed to his psychotic rage most likely a side effect of taking the drug and also after the Marine Corps had rejected him when he applied shortly after his 18th birthday. What makes no real sense is that teachers and counselors at Columbine had been telling the Harris&#39; and the Klebolds for quite some time that their sons were displaying disturbing behavior in their work in school especially their writings and even artwork that was confiscated from them. Then what boils down to it is how you do you go about ignoring what teachers are saying about your child ? How did the parents of these two guys not know they were building bombs in their house something should have tipped off the parents.

What some reports were said is that Dylan and Eric&#39;s parents should have been held fully responsible for seeking appropriate help for their child to address issues that were brought up out of concern by school officials. These parents had to have some idea that something wasnt sitting right when they&#39;re not looking in on them just to check up on them and even prohibiting them from having a computer in their room so they can monitor their activity online since they had created a webpage called Trenchcoat Mafia. This is why parents don&#39;t need to allow their kids to have computers in their rooms and need to keep it in a family room so that children can be monitored at all times. How could they not know that these two were stockpiling weapons and ammunition? That&#39;s just plain ignorance most parents would be searching rooms like a corrections officer doing a random cell search in a prison.

This is what is not clear with parents when they ignore the warning signs of a potential problem when teachers and counselors bring to their attention issues of disturbing behavior. Dylan and Eric were both time bombs ready to go off if this was due in part to the so called teasing, but maybe they may have done something to provoke the things that happened to them? People feel sorry for loners, but do they really get to the bottom of the truth behind their strange behavior. be surprised that the Harris&#39; and the Klebolds haven&#39;t relocated out of Colorado to an undisclosed location to escape the media frenzy. What would it take to stop future incidents like this from happening?

What can colleges and universities do to train their residential education staff to address issues of dorm residents acting bizzare like the guy at Virginia Tech. Resident Advisors need to be trained to spot potentially dangerous behavior in their residents and report this to the school. It shouldn&#39;t get to the point where incidents like this happen for something to be done about it. You have to nip that mess in the bud before it happens so that it not only saves the lives of innocent people who become the target of someone&#39;s anger out of control, but it will also bring increased awareness and security to campuses to protect enrollment status for the colleges and universities.

As a former Resident Advisor I will say to the future RA&#39;s that you need to make it your mission and job to show compassion and caring for your residents because you are in charge of making sure they feel safe and comfortable during their stay on campus. You are also a student leader and a confidant when students come to you with problems whether it&#39;s personal or not. I always told my residents I have an open door policy if they need anything please call or stop by my room. Some RA&#39;s are just in the job because of the perks they get which is free room and board and a stipend that&#39;s paid out through the year.

Some RA&#39;s aren&#39;t true to their jobs or to who they serve and that&#39;s what gives the good RA&#39;s who do their job a bad name and essentially just looking for an opportunity to make their resumes look good. There are times when you need an RA one isnt even around to help you and that&#39;s what frustrates a lot of students especially at big colleges and universities. I had some of the best residents around because some of them were students I had classes with and I talked to them outside of class if something&#39;s up, checked in with them just to let them know someone cares and if they have a problem we sought out the appropriate kind of help and utilized the school counselors if a problem was requiring the professional advice of a social worker or psychologist.

Most of these loners are crying for help if their behavior is turning violent and disturbing. If there&#39;s the fact that the guy behind the Virginia Tech shootings had been making references to Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris as martyrs for what they did during Columbine he&#39;s just a copy cat except he didn&#39;t attempt to hijack a plane to crash it into some major city. This explains that laws surrounding the rights of the mentally ill needs to be changed because some people have more than one type of mental illness which can in fact make them very dangerous. This in turn should make this kind of information readily available to residential education and the counseling department so they can know what students to watch for and if peers around this person begin to talk about changes in behavior or normal routines to take it as something is going on and be on high alert.

This is a hot topic across the board how many more incidents like this do we need to say something has to be done to stop this kind of violence on college and university campuses across the country. What can counselors do when confronting a parent(s) about their child having issues that needs to be addressed. Could the Harris&#39; and Klebolds avoided the mayhem their sons caused had they listened to the people who were trying to tell them their children had some serious issues.

This is going to be a hot topic for a while after the Virginia incident because for someone who clearly had mental illness this needs to be addressed and I am sure the parents of the young man who was involved in this are going to be living with the pain of what happened. I hope the Klebold and Harris families reach out to them to let them know they are not alone and to try and make sense of what drove their sons to do what they did. This is also a pattern too since you see mostly young white males from middle class backgrounds doing this, but this time it changes ethnic background to Asian. We as a society are ones to just sweep things under the rug and when something happens we&#39;re on our soapboxes trying to make sense of the situation.

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Original Source: <a href="http://www.groundreport.com/articles.php?id=2833730">http://www.groundreport.com/articles.php?id=2833730</a>

This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License</a>.

Nafeesah Abdullah

2007-06-05

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License

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