The Tangled Thicket of Cho seung-hui, Don Imus, YouTube and American Idol
April 21st, 2007 Cho seung-hui, the Rutgers University women'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' 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'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'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's Sports Illustrated, 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 -- Original Source: http://thestrangedeathofliberalamerica.com/2007/04/21/the-tangled-thicket-of-cho-seung-hui-don-imus-youtube-and-american-idol/ Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.
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Monday, April 16, 2007 As I wrapped up my afternoon course today, my students informed me of the 31 deaths at Virginia Tech today. It was the first I heard of it and so I immediately looked to the news and am now glued to the press conference airing on NBC. It is uncanny that this shooting tragedy has occurred in the same week as Colombine, 8 years ago (the very day I was interviewing for my job here). I am not sure what to make of this event yet, other than to be utterly horrified by this event and sorrowful for the community at Virginia Tech. We don't yet know how many of the deceased are students and how many are faculty. These details are sure to emerge over time. I am dismayed by the tone of the press, who launched into an attack of VT's President for not locking down the campus after the first shooting incident in the morning. The idea of lockdown and the idea that in the future we might have to post guards on our college campuses is frightening. This is a tragedy. This was an event that no one could've forseen (unless I am persuaded by evidence to the contray), and to respond to this event with greater militarism on college campuses horrifies me (perhaps more than the event itself). I will no doubt have something more to say about this event after I learn more facts and digest the coverage. In the meantime, I would appreciate any links to blogs from VT students or other bloggers covering this story. UPDATE: From the Huffington Post A White House spokesman said President Bush was horrified by the rampage and offered his prayers to the victims and the people of Virginia. "The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed," spokeswoman Dana Perino said BARF! Posted by Aspazia at Monday, April 16, 2007 -- Original source: http://melancholicfeminista.blogspot.com/2007/04/tragedy-at-virginia-tech.html Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
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Media Beat (4/19/07) By Norman Solomon Many days after the mass killings at Virginia Tech, grisly stories about the tragedy still dominated front pages and cable television. News of carnage on a vastly larger scale -- the war in Iraq -- ebbs and flows. The overall coverage of lethal violence, at home and far away, reflects the chronic evasions of the American media establishment. In the world of U.S. mainline journalism, the boilerplate legitimacy of official American violence overseas is a routine assumption. "The first task of the occupation remains the first task of government: to establish a monopoly on violence," George Will wrote on April 7, 2004, in the Washington Post. But three years later, his Newsweek column laments: "Vietnam produced an antiwar movement in America; Iraq has produced an antiwar America." Current polls and public discourse -- in spite of media inclinations to tamp down authentic anger at the war -- do reflect an "antiwar America" of sorts. So, why is the ghastly war effort continuing unabated? A big factor is the undue respect that's reserved for American warriors in American society. When a mentally unstable person goes on a shooting rampage in the United States, no one questions that such actions are intrinsically, fundamentally and absolutely wrong. The media condemnation is 100 percent. However -- even after four years of a U.S. war in Iraq that has been increasingly deplored by the American public -- the standard violence directed from the Pentagon does not undergo much critical scrutiny from American journalists. The president's war policies may come under withering media fire, but the daily activities of the U.S. armed forces are subjected to scant moral condemnation. Yet, under orders from the top, they routinely continue to inflict -- or serve as a catalyst for -- violence far more extensive than the shooting sprees that turned a placid Virginia campus into a slaughterhouse. News outlets in the United States combine the totally proper condemnation of killing at home with a notably different affect toward the methodical killing abroad that is funded by the U.S. Treasury. We often read, see and hear explicit media commendations that praise as heroic the Americans in uniform who are trying to kill, and to avoid being killed, in Afghanistan and Iraq. In recent decades, the trends of war have been clear. A majority of the dead -- estimated at 75 to 90 percent -- are civilians. They are no less innocent than the more than 30 people who suddenly died from gunshots at Virginia Tech. It would be inaccurate to say that the bulk of U.S. media's coverage accepts war launched from Washington. The media system of the USA does much more than accept -- it embraces the high-tech violence under the Pentagon's aegis. Key reasons are cultural, economic and political. We grew up with -- and continue to see -- countless movies and TV programs showing how certain people with a handgun, a machine gun or missiles are able to set wrongs right with sufficiently deft and destructive violence. The annual reports of large, medium and small companies boast that the U.S. Defense Department is a lucrative customer with more and more to spend on their wares for war. And the scope of political discourse, reinforced by major news outlets, ordinarily remains narrow enough to dodge the huge differences between "defense spending" and "military spending." More broadly, the big media rarely explore the terrain of basic moral challenges to the warfare state. Everyone who isn't deranged can agree that what happened on April 16, 2007, at the campus of Virginia Tech was an abomination. It came about because of an individual's madness. We must reject it without the slightest equivocation. And we do. But the media baseline is to glorify the U.S. military -- yesterday, today and tomorrow -- bringing so much bloodshed to Iraq. The social dynamics in our own midst, fueling the war effort, are spared tough scrutiny. We're constantly encouraged to go along, avidly or passively. Yet George Will has it wrong. The first task of government should not be "to establish a monopoly on violence." Government should work to prevent violence -- including its own. -- Original Source: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3088 Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0.
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(This message was distributed to all faculty, staff and students April 27, 2007.) In the days following the Virginia Tech tragedy, our solidarity with and sympathy for the faculty, staff, students and families affected by the loss of lives on April 16, 2007 remains front and centre in our minds. Openness and access are features that define us as a university, and we cherish those attributes greatly. At the same time we are conscious that these features make us vulnerable to the behaviour of troubled or violent people. Our overall approach to providing a safe environment is therefore guided by the desire to maintain and nurture openness while doing all we can to prepare for, prevent, and respond to crisis situations. The events of Friday April 20 were a good test of our overall philosophy and systems with respect to both safety and security. Shortly before 5 pm, a report was received of a male with a rifle in the vicinity of the bowl. Saskatoon Police Services (SPS) and Campus Safety responded, conducted a sweep of buildings in the vicinity, and declared the incident over at 7 pm. The next day SPS concluded, based on the report of another eyewitness, that the rifle was actually a bike seat and post and declared the incident a false alarm. This incident demonstrated strengths in our systems, including effective coordination with SPS. It also highlighted some areas for improvement, including our ability to communicate with the entire campus when necessary. There are many dimensions to our approach to safety. Our department of Campus Safety maintains a 24-hour watch over the campus, with a team of security staff on duty and a video-surveillance system. The U of S works closely and cooperatively with Saskatoon's emergency service organizations, engaging in joint training initiatives. There are a number of additional safety measures in place including safety alert notices, the Safewalk program, campus emergency phones, and counseling and health services for staff and students and their families. We encourage all members of our campus community to always be alert of potentially unsafe situations, suspicious persons or activities, and report anything unusual without hesitation to 966-5555 immediately, at any time of the day or night. Shortly after the Virginia tragedy, Vice-President Richard Florizone launched an assessment of the University's safety practices, with recommendations to be developed before the new academic year. The University continually reviews and renews its overall safety measures; however, this specific assessment seeks to ensure that our approach is based on best practices and incorporates the lessons learned in recent events. The personal safety and security of our campus community is of the greatest importance, and in this regard, we welcome any and all suggestions. Please forward any comments you have to richard.florizone@usask.ca. Peter MacKinnon, President, University of Saskatchewan Richard Florizone VP Finance and Resources, University of Saskatchewan (Posted on April 27, 2007) -- Original Source: http://blogs.usask.ca/studentnews/archive/2007/04/message_on_safe.html Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5.
The university community gathered in remembrance of the violence at Virginia Polytechnical University in a candle vigil last Thursday. Faculty, staff and students from Hamline's various colleges were all present. Over 120 people were in attendance, including multiple university administrators. The vigil included members of the religious community including university chaplain Theresa Mason, Rabbi Esther Adler and Bishop Rosalyn Carol. Bishop Carol said her goal is a world where no "people are dying because we do not live and love each other." Carol also said that the community at the university needed to celebrate the fact "that we are truly brothers and sisters." Poems in Hebrew and English were read, as well as psalms from the Christian Bible, Torah and Qur'an. Communication professor Suda Ishida performed a traditional Buddhist ritual, asking all present to link arms with the person beside them as water was poured from a basin unto the base of a tree. Adler spoke of a Virginia Tech professor and Holocaust survivor Liviu Librescu, and questioned his destiny. "Was April 16 his appointed purpose or just a cruel irony?" she said. CLA Sophomore Emily Hager-Garman led the choir in a version of "Oh, Jerusalem" and a faculty member from the Graduate school sang parts of the African national anthem. President Linda Hanson was visibly moved by the display of student and staff solidarity. Many in attendance were moved to tears as the names of the departed were read aloud and a bell on loan from Hamline United Methodist Church was tolled as each name was said. In addition, the student who led the Tibetan Buddhist invocation invited the community to create Tibetan prayer flags which were to be hung up outside Bush Library. The Tibetan prayer flag is a piece of cloth with a message for the living and departed. Many of the messages included words of hope, forgiveness and mourning. The service ended as the clock tower on Old Main ominously tolled 5 p.m. Compiled by Chris Matter and staff reports -- Original Source: Oracle Student Newspaper, Hamline University http://www.hamline.edu/oracle/archives/2007/04/24/index.html Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0.
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I'd been thinking about starting this blog up again for a few weeks now. I didn't think I'd have something so tragic to write about. Probably it goes without saying that my thoughts and best wishes go out to the students, faculty, and staff at my alma mater, Virginia Tech, and especially to the families and friends of the victims. I was working from home today, heads down with all my external inputs (radio, TV, email, IRC, RSS feeds, etc.) turned off, so it wasn't until mid-afternoon that I became aware of what had happened. It has shaken me up, more than I would have expected it would. It's disconcerting to see a community that you've been part of suffer an event like this, especially when you see so many images on the news of places you're quite familiar with. When I was a student at Virginia Tech, I had friends who lived on the 4th floor Ambler-Johnston Hall, where the first shooting took place. I had classes in Norris Hall, where the second shooting occurred. I know these places. They were my places. It was my community. Even though I've been gone from Tech for a long time, it still hits close to home. Back in '88-'89 I was one of the editors of the Collegiate Times, Virginia Tech's student newspaper. I've thought a lot about the students working at the Collegiate Times today. What was the biggest story we dealt with back in '88-'89? I think a steroids scandal on one of the sports teams. Nothing to compare to what happened today. What a time it must be for those young, aspiring journalists. How difficult it must be to cover what will probably be the biggest story of your life when you are just twenty or twenty-one. Doubly difficult since it is the slaughter of your classmates that you have to cover. As young journalists they must feel a great deal of excitement at The Big Story . . . and, at the same time, a great deal of guilt and dread for being excited while their friends lay dead. I hope they sense the importance of their role of as the student voice of the Virginia Tech campus more than ever. (CollegiateTimes.com is down, and the server is re-directing to CollegeMedia.com, the parent site for the student media outlets at Tech. And I just noticed that the Collegiate Times Online Editor, who has been posting to http://www.collegemedia.com all afternoon is named Christopher Ritter. No relation, if you were wondering.) Besides my former professors, I only know a couple of people still at Virginia Tech. None of them were likely to have been in either of the buildings where the shootings took place, but I've dropped them emails anyway. And I've been contacted today by former classmates who I haven't heard from in years. When something like this happens, you start thinking about the people who shared your life then and you want to reach out to them, even if you've been silent for years, because their the only ones who are going to understand your loss in the same way. The news reports are saying that this is the worst shooting on a college campus in American history. Oddly, one of the other campus massacres that has been mentioned repeatedly was a 1991 shooting rampage by a physics grad student (who also killed himself) at the University of Iowa, where I went to graduate school. My other alma mater. That took place just three months after I left Iowa City, and, unlike today's tragedy at VT, I knew many people who were on campus at that time. Then a few years back, in the fall of 2000, a student murdered one of his classmates at Gallaudet University, and went un-apprehended for months until he killed again in February. I had worked at Gallaudet for three years and left just a bit more than a year before the murders there. Again, I was gone, but, again, I knew many people affected by this. It wasn't the kind of rampage like at Iowa or Virginia Tech, but it held the campus hostage to fear nonetheless. So this is the third time I've watched a campus where I have lived, studied, or worked be victimized by a murderer. It sucks. It sucks for me, it makes me cry to see a community -- my community -- ravaged, even after I've been absent from it for years And as miserable and helpless as I feel, I can't imagine how horrible it is for those living through it. Posted by Greg on April 16, 2007 10:48 PM -- Original Source: http://www.tenreasonswhy.com/weblog/archives/2007/04/thinking_about_1.html Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0.
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[Philosophical Musing on Media Culture] By Carl Davidson 20 Apr 2007 The universe throws curve balls at us, now and then. It seems to want to wake us up, and teach us lessons in impermanence and interconnectedness. Take the killings at Virginia Tech. A strange, quiet young Korean man, Cho Seung-Hui, writer of tortured and violent plays and screeds, makes his own solipsistic martial arts-gangsta video of himself, and sends it to the media, in the course of slaughtering 32 people, then killing himself. The media sensationalizes it. MSNBC ratings go through the roof as its images are repeated, to millions and millions, then all the networks join in the frenzy. As expected, other troubled youth respond, in copy-cat fashion, often only with words, and scares shut down numerous classes across the country. At the same time, discussions of 'healing' get underway. Talk show commentators are having a time of it. I hear both liberal and conservatives alike carry on about 'looking in the face of evil' and trashing the notions of illness and therapy. Rush Limbaugh and one caller on his show go on about how the Korean youth is an 'America hater,' 'suicide bomber,' and simply evil. Retired FBI guys talk about 'training' students to be able to respond better, and hiring tougher 'security.' People debate police tactics, censorship and guns. Then a British paper goes to a tiny hut in Korea, and a reporter talks to the boy's grandparents, who say he was a bad kid and 'deserved to die' for his sins. But the grandparents also reveal the poverty of his parents as they immigrated to the U.S. Most important, they reveal their grandson was diagnosed early with autism, but the poverty all around prevented them from doing much about it, either in Korea or here. Autism is recently growing with unusual speed in the US. Parents, rich and poor, are desperate for help, since dealing with an autistic child is often beyond any couple, however well off. One radio personality, Don Imus, takes up their cause. He helps grow their organization for families of Autistic children, and raises millions. His wife, an environmentalist, believes toxins, perhaps in vaccines, are partly to blame, and demands independent research. Wealthy pharmaceutical companies and the Wall Street Journal counter-attack, smearing the couple. But Imus is relentless, and blasts away at their money-grubbing and lies. Largely through his efforts, a compromise measure, offering some relief, gets through Congress, but he pushes on for more substantive solutions, and raises millions more. Now the effort has stopped, or is at least severely reduced. Imus, as we well know, also indulged in racist, sexist and chauvinist commentary and locker-room 'jokes,' repeatedly, and finally went too far. He realized it, blamed himself and tried to make amends. He promised changes in his show, but accepted whatever he got, saying he had dished it out long enough, now it was his turn to take it. But a groundswell wanted more. They wanted his show shut down, period, and it was. Many people declared victory over racism and sexism, and to a degree, it was. The media moguls preened about their new-found responsibility and the need for change. At least until 32 people died at Virginia Tech. Now we have a new wave of violence featured in the media, and Imus is old news, history. And we have a new wave of blame, and a new staking out of moral ground against evil. But you can make a good case that untreated autism, rooted in poverty, was the root cause of what happened at Virginia Tech, however terrible the consequences and the suffering visited on those who didn't deserve it in the least, just as the Rutgers women didn't deserve it in the least. The whole thing reminds me of Thich Nhat Hanh's long poem, 'Call Me by My True Name.' It's about looking deeply, in the poem, about a Thai sailor, and his raping and killing Vietnamese boat people. It's too long a story to retell here, but do yourself a favor and read it, or better yet, listen to it sometime. But given this latest curve ball, I think I'll wait a bit before declaring either Don Imus or Cho Seung-Hui, connected in this curious way, to be evil, or at least, in the case of Imus, who's still with us, beyond public redemption. Related http://carldavidson.blogspot.com -- Original Source: http://chicago.indymedia.org/newswire/display/77298/index.php Licensed under Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication.
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EDITORIAL Published Apr 17, 2007 11:36 PM Yet another rampage has occurred at a school, this time leaving 33 people dead at Virginia Tech—the worst such incident ever at a U.S. college campus. The news media seem stunned and surprised, yet their coverage sounds so similar to the stories about Columbine eight years ago. They dwell on the personality of the young man the police say did the shooting, before killing himself. They talk about him being a "loner," depressed, perhaps angry at women. But aren't there lonely and depressed people all over the world? Many countries have high suicide rates. Why is it that here some become mass murderers? The U.S. is the world leader in seemingly random acts of violence by individuals. Why? President George W. Bush rushed to Virginia to speak at a large convocation the day after the killings and tried to set the tone for what could be said about them. "It's impossible to make sense of such violence and suffering," he said. Don't ask why, don't try to understand. It makes no sense. "Have faith" instead, was Bush's message. But there ARE reasons these things happen here, and they are pretty clear to the rest of the world. It's just in the United States that no one is supposed to talk about the reasons. What distinguishes this country from the rest of the world? It is neither the most affluent nor the poorest. It is neither the most secular nor the most religious. It is not the most culturally homogeneous nor is it the most diverse. But in one area, it stands virtually alone. It has the biggest arsenal of high-tech weaponry in the world, way surpassing every other country. It has military bases spread all over; most countries have no troops outside their borders. It is conducting two hot wars at the moment, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has sent hundreds of thousands of troops abroad over the last few years. Every day, the public here is supposed to identify with soldiers who burst into homes in Baghdad, round up the people and take them away for "interrogation"—which everyone knows now can mean torture and indefinite detainment. It also sends heavily armed "special ops" on secret missions to countless other countries, like the ones who just facilitated the invasion and bombing of Somalia, or the ones who have been trying to stir up opposition in Iran. This is documented in the news media. The immense brutality of these colonial wars, as well as earlier ones, is praised from the White House on down as the best, the ONLY way to achieve what the political leaders and their influential, rich backers decide is necessary to protect their world empire. Do lots of people get killed? "Stuff happens," said former war secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "Collateral damage," says the Pentagon. At home, the U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Over 2 million people are locked up in the prison system each year, most of them people of color. When commercial armed security guards are also taken into consideration, the U.S. has millions of employees who use guns and other coercive paraphernalia in their jobs. In the final analysis, the military and the police—the "armed bodies of men," as Marxists used to define them before women were added to their ranks—exist to perpetuate and protect this present unjust system of capitalist inequality, where a few can claim personal ownership over a vast economy built by the sweat and blood of hundreds of millions of workers. And the more divided, the more polarized the society becomes, the higher the level of coercion and violence. Assault weapons are now everywhere in this society, as are Tasers, handcuffs, clubs and tear gas. They most often start out in the hands of the police, the military and other agents of the state, and can then turn up anywhere. Violence is a big money maker in the mass culture. Television, films, pulp novels, Internet sites, video games—all dwell on "sociopaths" while glorifying the state's use of violence, often supplemented by a lone vigilante. By the time children reach their teens, they have already seen thousands of murders and killings on television. And these days even more suspense is added in countless programs that involve stalking and terror against women—and increasingly children. As the Duke rape case and so many "escort service" ads show, women of color are particularly subject to exploitation and have little recourse to any justice. And as the murders along the border show, immigrants of color are fair game for racist killers. The social soil of capitalism can alienate and enrage an unstable and miserable person who should be getting help but can't find it. If, as reports are saying, the young man accused of these killings was on anti-depressant medication, it is all the more evidence that, at a time when hospitals are closing and health care is unavailable for tens of millions, treating mental health problems requires more from society than just prescribing dubious chemicals. Many liberal commentators are taking this occasion to renew the demand for tougher gun laws. Yes, assault weapons are horrible, but so are bunker buster bombs, helicopters that fire thousands of rounds a minute, and the ultimate—nuclear weapons. Disarming the people is not the answer, especially when the capitalist state is armed to the teeth and uses brutality and coercion daily. The best antidote to these tragedies is to build a movement for profound social change, for replacing capitalism with socialism, so that people's energies can be directed at solving the great problems depressing so much of humanity today, whether they be wars or global climate change or the loneliness of the dog-eat-dog society. -- Copyright 1995-2007 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved. Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011 Email: ww@workers.org Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php -- Original Source: http://www.workers.org/2007/editorials/virginia-tech-0426/
Copyright 1995-2007 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
By Salah Obeid Online Journal Contributing Writer Jun 8, 2007, 00:27 There isn't room enough on the calendar to honor every American hero, but Aug. 16, the birthday of one such hero, is a day teachers and others who cherish education should make a point of celebrating. No one knows what drove Liviu Librescu, four months short of his 77th birthday, to martyr himself to the cause of education. But that is what Librescu, a Romanian-born Holocaust survivor and mechanical engineering professor, did when he blocked a gunman from entering his Virginia Tech University classroom on April 16 -- earning him five bullets, one of them to the head -- so that most of his students could escape through the windows. Because he was slain in a public learning institution, public schools are where he should be celebrated. And because Librescu (the root of whose name, "libre," is Latin for "free") came to America searching for freedom, those who teach subjects like U.S. history and government should make honoring him a lesson on where his adopted country truly stands on freedom. By the time they enter college, many students in this country can't think critically about history and politics, having rarely been encouraged in school to think creatively outside of art and music class. Yet wolfing down hot dogs and soaking up sun on a field trip to celebrate Librescu Day could amount to more than just indigestion and sunburn, if the day were also an occasion for students to reflect on how their country, a magnet for immigrants seeking freedom, too often deprives people in other countries of the very freedoms Americans enjoy. Throughout its history, the United States has -- in places like Latin America, Haiti, the Philippines and elsewhere -- picked fights at the drop of a dime whenever dollars were to be made, a fact that is largely ignored in classrooms around the country. The result is that, as the country gets bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, many students don't know any better than to think thousands of their fellow citizens, most only slightly older than them, are killing and being killed in those countries in the name of spreading freedom. But freedom can mean many things. Librescu, born on Aug. 16, 1930, on the outskirts of Bucharest, was barely nine when World War II broke out and could only watch as his government, also in the name of freedom, helped the Nazis annihilate hundreds of thousands of Romania's Jewish citizens. Luckily he survived, became an accomplished scientist and, in 1986, after living several years in Israel, left for Virginia on a sabbatical and never looked back. Little did he know that years later a frustrated, mentally-ill college student would alone succeed where the focused efforts of the entire Nazi Party had failed. Still, Librescu's death will have been partly in vain if teachers ignore the dedication symbolized by a colleague's choosing to die so that his students might live to see another classroom. Ignorance that isn't necessarily willful but rather the result of intimidation. How else to explain that so many U.S. history and government teachers go out of their way to avoid discussing the context in which President Bush, in his second inaugural address, for example, used words like "freedom" and "liberty" some dozen odd times? Or in which Vice President Dick Cheney, during remarks to Westminster College in Missouri a few years ago, paraphrased Winston Churchill's assessment of the struggle against Soviet communism, in order to paint a picture of the chaos in U.S.-occupied Iraq as a contest between "those who served an aggressive, power-hungry ideology and those who believed in human liberty, freedom of conscience and the dignity of every life"? Words like "liberty" and expressions like "freedom of conscience" are easily said; the challenge is living up to the ideals they represent. But often politicians aren't so challenged to begin with, and worse, sometimes rely on such words, as George Orwell wrote, "in a consciously dishonest way." Dignity of life, after all, means little coming from someone like Cheney, whose central pursuit over the past few years has been to enrich his friends at Enron and Halliburton over the dead bodies of an estimated million or so Iraqi civilians -- people who might have lived in fear under Saddam Hussein, but who at least could've expected to live with far more certainty than can Iraqis today. Propaganda and censorship is something that, growing up in communist Romania, Librescu knew all too well. The same can be said of another Jewish hero to whom he is often compared. On Aug. 5, 1942, German soldiers stormed an orphanage for Jewish children in Warsaw, instructing the man who ran it, Janusz Korczak, that he was free to go, but that his 200 or so orphans and several staff members were slated for extermination. Unlike Librescu, Korczak couldn't save his charges from death. Instead, he followed them to the gas chamber, his final gesture to children who'd had so little and died so young. A renowned children's author and pediatrician, Korczak was also a teacher, and instructed hundreds at his Dom Sierot (Polish for "house for orphans") with little regard for convention. Those who survived the war recount being allowed to form a "kind of a republic for children, with its own small parliament, court and newspaper," according to an entry on Wikipedia.org. By contrast, a half-century later, American public schools appear intent on turning students into automatons. And even that they're getting wrong. Students in the United States, in subjects like math and science, which require learning mostly by mind-numbing rote, lag behind their counterparts in miserably poor countries like Bangladesh, Burundi, El Salvador and Nepal. Generally, though, American students also read less for pleasure, visit fewer museums and attend schools with mediocre teachers, all easily gleaned from comparing how flippant and addicted to pop culture many young Americans are next to kids in less fortunate parts of the world. Maybe that is because, as one credit card company likes to say, there are some things money can't buy. China, where teachers get paid a pittance by a government that looks with scorn at individual rights and free speech, generally has a more well-read, independent-minded, smarter population than ours. Which is what outright censorship does: breed rebellion. Censorship, though, shouldn't be allowed any wiggle room in a country billing itself as the "land of the free." Yet the United States has become fertile ground for it, an indication of which is that mainstream media, not satisfied with just obscuring the "who," "what" and "where" in its news coverage, goes to great lengths to avoid the "why" altogether. It may be just as well, then, that many kids come home from school in the afternoon only to get super glued to MTV, video games or websites like Myspace.com, since much of what's in the news would sooner confuse than educate them. Were that not sad enough, the education that does manage to seep into the minds of these would-be torchbearers of democracy is watered down to the point of irrelevancy. Not because teachers are stupid, evil or lazy but because most are simply too afraid to rock the boat. Many teachers understand they swim in murky water. Water that has swallowed teachers like Deb Mayer at Clear Creek Elementary in Monroe County, Indiana, near Bloomington (home, ironically, to liberal arts-dominated Indiana University). Mayer was fired in 2003 after she dared discuss the subject of peace movements during a general class discussion about the build-up to the war in Iraq. Similarly, a school in Wilton, Conn., recently banned a play about the conflict in that country. "In Wilton, most kids only care about Britney Spears shaving her head or Tyra Banks gaining weight," 16-year-old Devon Fontaine, a cast member, told The New York Times. "What we wanted was to show kids what was going on overseas." The school administration's reply: "You can't always get what you want." Censorship is well documented in schools throughout the country. Schools like Columbine High School in Colorado, where Alfred Wilder was fired in 1996 for showing Bernardo Bertolucci's film, "1900," which explores fascism, to a senior class studying logic and debate. That instance of censorship may even have cost 13 students and a teacher their lives. A video depicting students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold rehearsing for the massacre they'd go on to carry out at the school three years later wasn't allowed to be shown on school grounds because of the controversy surrounding the Bertolucci film. "If the video had indeed been shown," Al Hidell wrote in "The New Conspiracy Reader," "perhaps somebody would have realized the serious threat it represented, which may have prevented the tragedy from occurring." Rarely, of course, is censorship so dramatic in its outcome that it becomes a matter of life and death. But there is such a thing as a slow death. Appalled by the stifling of his film, Bertolucci wrote that it was no less than a prelude to totalitarianism when classrooms become a place "in which the voice of established authority denounced criticism or debate, and used the high school classroom to silence other voices." Voices that hold that "children are the future. Teach them well and let them lead the way." Before letting cocaine lead the way for her instead, Whitney Huston knew what she was singing about. The minute students are fit to broach subjects like history, government and political affairs is the minute they should be challenged to imagine their future roles as informed, voting citizens. Citizens like Librescu, who wore many hats but probably would have been happy to be remembered as one more in a long line of educators who eschewed empty slogans, who knew that leaving no child behind meant arming students with curiosity, compassion and courage. Courage, though, shouldn't mean that 3,500 young Americans, and counting, have to take their final breath in a country that never meant the United States any harm. Courage should mean educating the nation's youth so that they can spot a charlatan when they see one, even if he worms his way up to the presidency itself. Those who will inherit this nation need that kind of courage from those who've been here a while, so that they too can develop the courage to die if need be. But to die in the spirit of someone like Librescu, who took one bullet after another yet refused to let go, so that others might live and learn. And be free. Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal -- Archived courtesy of Online Journal. Original Source: http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2062.shtml
Bev Conover, Editor and Publisher, Online Journal (editor_oj@yahoo.com or editor@onlinejournal.com)
US churches call for gun control following university shootings
News Brief By staff writers 17 Apr 2007 Expressing the sorrow of many Christians in the US at yesterday's killings in Virginia, the General Secretary of the National Council of Churches USA (NCC USA) has also renewed the NCC's call for 'meaningful' legislation to prevent gun violence. "My pastor's heart breaks for the families of those who died today," said the Rev Dr Bob Edgar following the fatal shooting at Virginia Tech University. "Faith leaders have spoken up continually about the epidemic of gun violence in our country," Dr Edgar said in a statement. "Despite repeated calls from faith and community leaders to Congress and presidents nothing ever seems to get done to stem the tide." Dr Edgar, himself a former Member of Congress, lamented that the issue of gun violence seems to get such little attention from those who have the power to do something about it. "How many more will have to die before we say enough is enough? How many more senseless deaths will have to be counted before we enact meaningful firearms control in this country? How many more of our pastors, rabbis and imams will have to preside over caskets of innocent victims of gun violence because a nation refused to stop the proliferation of these small weapons of mass destruction?," said Dr Edgar. Edgar pointed to the NCC USA's 1967 policy calling for firearms control and a March 2000 interfaith campaign calling for an end to the epidemic of gun violence in the nation. "The escalation of gun violence compels us to call for an end to the manufacture and easy distribution of such instruments of destruction," Edgar said in 2000 and reiterated that statement today. Edgar invited people of faith and goodwill to send messages of support to a weblog set up by the Virginia Interfaith Center. The NCC USA is an ecumenical voice of America's Orthodox, Protestant, Anglican, historic African American and traditional peace churches. These 35 communions have 45 million members in 100,000 congregations in all 50 states. -- Original Source: Ekklesia http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/5059 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 England & Wales License.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 England & Wales License
Moment de comemorare a studentilor de la universitatea Alexandru Ioan Cuza, Iasi pentru studentii de la Virginia Tech - vineri, 20 aprilie 2007 Moment of commemoration from the students and faculty of Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iasi, Romania for Virginia Tech- Friday, April 20th, 2007. -- Sursa Originala: http://www.uaic.ro/uaic/bin/view/Photos/RememberVirginiaTech