just zeroes and ones
so the va tech lunatic murderer left some commentary behind. calculated, cruel and absolutely desperate for attention, he took pictures of himself pointing guns at cameras, trying to make himself feel powerful, significant.
i am a selfish, broken, needy human being, and i still have to work to keep much of that stuffed into my back pocket when interacting with other humans. anger and jealousy and frustration and sadness have made me want to hurt people. usually that urge doesn't last a very long time, but i've glimpsed that feeling more than once in my life.
i seriously can't figure out how you can gun down another person, though, and be able to continue. i don't care how desensitized you are. taking a life and then moving on and doing it again... and then dozens more...
whenever i hear about tragedies like this i always find myself pondering the events in a person's life that lead them to this kind of breaking point. the collection of factors that contributed to cho's twisted mind feeling that murder would alleviate his pain. i often find myself mourning, along with the innocent lives lost, the soul that was destroyed - the person whose life is so wracked with tragedy... the person who existed moments before the evil took over and made them think "i need to kill".
i don't know what makes me think this way. i've never quite felt rage and despair brought on by loss, i think. and i also manage to wonder how far any of us are - given the wrong circumstances - from seriously hurting other people.
it's just so awful. all of it. i hate our world, days like this i wish i loved others more deeply, and at the same time i wish i could just be done and move on to eternity. people are trying to figure him out, dig into why he did it, what's the cause, a perfectly natural response to tragedy. they're trying to figure out which games he read, cultural icons he identified with, websites he went to... it's all pointless. our world is a disaster area. i'm not hopeless about our best efforts to extend an embrace through the crap in everyone's lives...
but for all our time spent trying to make the world a better place, this type of thing can help to zoom in on saving the human heart, the only cause worth pursuing. Jesus didn't seem to bother with anything else, as far as i can tell.
i don't think i'm going to pick up a GTA-esque games anymore. i'm not blind to the fact that violent media can put ideas in people's heads, but i also think blaming the broken taillight for the car exploding is quite unreasonable. no, i just don't think it will feel quite as fake when i shoot at a person in-game ever again.
Well said Justin
i won't stop playing CS either. there's something senseless about GTA that has always nagged at me in-game, and i end up feeling kind of slimy afterwards... and not just because i've been sweating a lot.
but team-based stuff like CS, where you're defending something meaningful... or like UT2k4, where i'm blowing up robots or aliens. it's like the morons that criticize harry potter for encouraging the occult, but have no problem with the cartoons on saturday mornings that depict an equally fictional - and harmless - world.
i realize that others may see these boundaries between types of content as more arbitrary - and i'm not saying anyone should do what i do - simply explaining how i see things and the way my convictions are changing.
This is where you should wake up every morning and thank God that you don't have some kind of serious mental illness and up to this point in your life, you still have your common sense about you. I'm serious, praise God for that. I do. I see parents everyday that clearly do not have any common sense at all and I've seen where its gotten them. They have their kids taken away and they have to see me once a week, or worse.
I really can't relate to the gaming note. I've never really enjoyed playing shoot'em up games at all. Except the OG Wolfenstein. That was pretty tight. AND ALSO NOT REAL!!!
What is really chapping my A recently is the medias attempt to really dig at people and find some kind of goat to blame for all this that's not the actual gunman. Watching a lot of the news programs with brave parents of some of the victims and the medias constant, "Don't you think that there was something the university or law enforcement could have done so that your child would still be alive today???" Its ludicris. There's only one person responsible for this madness. He was an English major. Everything else is crap. And like someone said on my page the other day, and I agree with, is that sometimes shit happens and there was never anything you could really do to stop it outside of being a really really good fortune teller.
The media should just stick it, shut their mouths and let people live thier lives in peace.
The other sad fact about all this is that some poor schmoe is going to lose his job for all this and there wasn't a damn thing they could do about it.
(steps off his soapbox)
I'm still waiting for Rosie O'Donnell to allege that the Bush administration hired Cho Seung-Hui to shoot up V-Tech to take the focus on the war in Iraq. Come on Rosie, you crazy bird, you know you want to.
So wait, there's something wrong with being an English major?
yes - they are nappy headed hos, duh
English majors = South Koreans.
dude, i thought you were irish???
I can't help but thinking about the song Window in the Skies and yearning for the lyric "the bullet's quit the gun" to be true.
and you'd be wrong. i support gun control, but as Hamrick mentioned above, don't take away my rights in order to make that happen.
Some would say we should just make bullets cost $5000 each. Should we just do that?
The "bullets [don't need to] quit the gun," people need to be educated.