33 students are dead. One of them was a punk – a hateful, vengeful and pitiful punk. Yet, you glorify him. You, the almighty media, give him – posthumously – all that he craved in life: a voice.
Everything he could not say to your face, every tear-filled stare of sullen anguish hidden behind dark sunglasses and the down-turned brim of a hat, every cry for help – was ignored until he screamed in tortured anguish, Monday morning, April 16, 2007. Only then did he truly speak and he vowed to be heard. His 9mm tongue spit fire and brimstone. Will you listen, now?
His own words in his short life were lost, muffled and garbled in an immature mouth gurgling over with bile and hatred for a world he, ironically, saw as mad. Perception is reality. When will we learn to hear others and not define them by our own subjective perceptions of a reality that is only known to us and no one else, no matter how seemingly choreographed the mass of shadows dancing on the wall may appear.
When will we learn to speak into someone’s listening?
Cho Seung-hui may have been nothing more than a mean-spirited, fucked-up kid who didn’t play well with others. Regardless of his childhood pain, fears and failure to be absorbed into a brave new world, I do not condone the manner of his outrage. However, I do understand that he, alone, is not responsible for his slide into the abyss of annihilation – for himself and most certainly not his victims.
We live in a world where children kill children. Cameras are small enough to shove up everyone’s ass. Microphones are thrust into the faces of the grieving like the business end of halberds during the Battle of Bosworth Field. Before the corpse is cold we want to dissect the cadaver and find out what made it tick.
Some clocks are simply wound too tight. When a spring snaps, time stops.
Have you ever thought that, perhaps, you should discover who you are and why you do what you do, before you attempt to analyze the grand illusion? In checking the online news of the day, I noticed one interview with a dorm hall neighbor of the first woman killed by Cho. I’d provide the link, here, but after seeing the piece I don’t wish to contribute to the senselessness behind the shoddy journalism, whether the young interviewee was a willing participant or not.
This young woman graphically depicted the horror of finding her Residential Adviser’s lifeless body in a pool of blood inside the room of her neighbor, the first victim of a fellow student’s madness. She broke down, repeatedly, describing how she heard her dear friend’s scream of fright and pain as well as seeing the pistoleer’s bloody footprints leading away, probably to go drop his media manifesto in the mail for NBC.
The ABC reporter’s voiceover interrupts the girl’s crying:
VO – “The pain of reliving it all . . . so intense, that a few times during the interview, we stopped the cameras to let XXXX recover.”
The camera cuts to the ABC reporter who reaches over to comfort the distraught girl. [This is supposed to prove that journalists are feeling creatures, too.]
Then, the reporter asked the student on-camera, “I mean, the image you painted is so gruesome and terrifying . . . seeing the blood . . . and not knowing what was going on, I mean . . . how much does that haunt you?”
Excuse the fuck out of me? Didn’t we just see and hear exactly how much this haunted the young woman? Why don’t you just pour some more salt in that open wound? This type of questioning may be helpful to her psychologist or priest, but I’m tired of hearing journalists pretending to be either of these other professions in the midst of grief and chaos. Stick to the facts, please, and stop airing the up-to-the-minute media probing of every painful impression that lands on your desk.
And you wonder why the Chos of the world freak out. You’re an insensitive lot that is more interested in milking the teat of human misery, plumbing the depths of pathetic pathos and wallowing in the offal of your neighbor’s cluster fuck than finding truth or answers. Your questions and timing are inappropriate and their broadcast is not newsworthy.
How many new terrorists have you trained, today, rewarding them with the glory and exposure that their hardened hearts desire? How many more mass murders must you cover in all their gory detail before you get it? How many bodies have you clambered over on your scramble up the ladder of success? You are ambulance chasers and victim rapers and your “journalism” is nothing more than your own ego’s masturbation in the face of human dignity.
The Kat
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