Everyone deserves a chance...

Reading the news of the Virginia Tech massacre, I couldn't help but felt sorry for the 'gunman' Cho Seung Hoi.

What he did was totally unacceptable, inhuman and sickening in every sense.

But clearly, he is a victim of rejection, of ignorance. That was what's driven him to snap.

This is an excerpt quoted from The Salt Lake Tribune:

BLACKSBURG, Va. - Long before he snapped, Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui was picked on, pushed around and laughed at over his shyness and the strange way he talked when he was a schoolboy in the Washington suburbs, former classmates say. Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior who graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va., with Cho in 2003, recalled that the South Korean immigrant almost never opened his mouth and would ignore attempts to strike up a conversation. Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho's turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded ''like he had something in his mouth," Davids said. ''As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, 'Go back to China,"' Davids said.

You could read all about it at :

http://origin.sltrib.com/ci_5702815

Don't you think that's really mean? Don't you feel that had Cho been given more opportunities to open up, to feel that he is indeed a part of a group, not someone so alien, this Virginia Tech incident could have been prevented?

On countless occassions I have witnessed situations like this. People simply pick on someone whom they think is weird, or poor, or stupid, or ugly.

This, is one of the reasons that I stay away from belonging to any groups. This way, I am free to talk to whomever I wish. I am not someone who would pick on people simply because the majority says he is weird, or ugly, or poor, or stupid.

I really like this particular comment :

guitarboy: 4/19/2007 11:50:00 AM

Guns don't kill people. People kill people (except in uncommon cases). Some people in Cho's position have committed suicide, but without hurting anybody else. Cho's terrible, horrifying and unjustifiable decision to take other people out with him have complicated this terrible disaster. He cannot be escused from that decision.

Having said that, the effects of teasing are undeniable. We can say "yeah but he might have had clinical depression, that's the reason," but that must not be the reason. Plenty of people with clinical depression do not gun people down. I'm pointing to the teasing factor. The fruits that we have reaped as a society by teasing, belittling and tormenting this quiet foreigner, are not the first time the fruits of suicide as a response to teasing have occurred. This time, the results were even worse. Why do we tease? Have any of you teased people when you were young? I have. I regret it. I confess it. I point to it as part of our society's problem. I never teased anybody relentlessly, day after day after day. But I still contributed to the culture of teasing in this country, when I was in school. How many of us are guilty? Let us point that portion of the blame at ourselves, those of us who are guilty of teasing.

Teasing in school yards constitutes intentional inflinction of emotional distress, and in some cases, a reasonable apprehension of a harmful or offensive touching. Both are violations of tort law (and one is a crime), which are prosecuted when commited by adults. But...we don't prosecute it when it is commited by children...we just have teachers or parents who sometimes ask the children to stop teasing, sometimes keep them in from recess. But...the teasing, the bullying the bigotry does not stop. The harm that is caused when done to children is usually much more damaging (because the recipient is in a formative stage) than when the similar wrong is commited by an adult against an adult and for which the problem adult can get sued or prosecuted. Interesting that greater damage can occur in the school environment, student against student, that we cannot prosecute and have failed to solve or resolve.

Our society continues to produce every year a new class of people who bully, tease and demean. It is a learned behavior in many cases, other times it is the result of an early independent behavior that goes uncorrected. In either case...

...teasing is clearly not the only factor here. But it appears to have been a major, primary one. It is possible that the teasing our society committed is a key causal connection in this murderous rampage, along with other causal connections.

This is a terrible murder, a terrible crime. I wish we would not tease, delittle and demean people relentlessly. If we would stop, as a society, less people who snap into suicide and, in worse cases, murder. It would not fix everything. It would be a good start.

Everybody deserves to have a chance, do you agree? To live, to speak, to be heard, to participate.

To say it in Malay, "Berilah dia peluang.. dia pun nak hidup juga".

Is that too much to ask for?