muckefuck | I wasn't going to post on this

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I wasn't going to post on this

I've read a lot of sad things in the wake of Blacksburg, among them

that_dang_otter's bitter point that, on average, more Americans than died there are killed every day in the USA, but since they're not all killed in one place, they don't garner the same kind of attention. We can glimpse just how inured we've become to their deaths by the fact that the officials at VA Tech weren't willing to cancel classes for 20,000 on account of only two on-campus murders. It makes me wonder what their cut-off was: Four students? Ten? Would it be the same for faculty and/or staff? What's the quota where I work? And has it changed in light of Monday's events?

But I think the saddest thing I've read so far is this:

Kim Min-kyung, a South Korean student at Virginia Tech reached by telephone from Seoul, said there were about 500 Koreans at the school, including Korean-Americans. She said she had never met Cho. She said South Korean students feared retaliation and were gathering in groups.

I so dearly wish I could say they were just being paranoid, but I'm too well acquainted with human nature--and past reactions to massacres with minority perpetrators--to say that.

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I agree that they're not just being paranoid, but I think there's a qualitative difference here from the examples linked, which is that there is no linkage (real, partially real, imagined, or otherwise) being made between the fact that Cho was South Korean and what he did, whereas the religion of the 9/11 attackers was a big part of the story. (Before he was identified, I'll grant you, it was kind of inexplicable to he was described only as "Asian and resident at the dormitories" rather than, say, "an undergrad".)

For the record, the saddest thing I've read was this:

I just watched a CNN reporter completely lose his composure while he described the local emergency officials removing the bodies from Norris Hall as the dead students' cell phones were ringing and buzzing, their frantic parents tried to make sure that they were okay. I don't even know what to do with that image.

(From the blog "Schuyler's Monster", I read it quoted in Brooklynite's lj)

I've already seen one attempt to link the killer's nationality to his crime by means of South Korea's compulsory military service. (And this despite the fact that I can find no mention of his having reported for duty in any of the news articles.) I'm now bracing myself for the trickle of opinion pieces about how the pressure of familial expectations on Asian-Americans makes them all ticking time bombs.

I'm not sure what the religion of the perpetrators could possibly have to do with the post-9/11 hate crimes enumerated in the article I linked to. What they have in common is not their beliefs--among the victims are a Sikh and a Coptic Christian--but their appearance. They were targeted for no other reason than because they "looked Middle-Eastern".

I haven't seen that, but I've been watching mainstream media, not blogs. And I bet there will be the opinion pieces on Asian family expectations, but on the other hand, there will be more about mental illness.

I don't want to put myself in the position of defending the logic of idiots who commit hate crimes, I'll just say that such idiots don't have a full grasp of world religion and probably made the assumption that there's a relationship between "looking Middle Eastern" and "being Muslim." Fine-grained distinctions (or even coarse-grained ones) are not something often made by such idiots. Again, I see a qualitative difference in the perils faced by Muslims (and people who might be mistaken for Muslims) after 9/11 and the peril of South Koreans on the VA Tech campus now.

The guy's family emigrated in 1992, when he was seven, so he would not have served in the S. Korean military. Friends of mine who have indicate that it was essentially boring civil service make-work. For a country that has technically been at war for over a half a century, S. Korea seems to have remarkably little militarism in its culture. Chalk it up to living under U.S. nuclear umbrella, I guess.

But he's still identified as a South Korean citizen, which means he became eligible for military service at age 18. It's entirely possible that he could've returned to Korea for a year to complete his tour of duty; I've known other US permanent residents (chiefly citizens of South Korea and Israel) who have done this, even though some of them have also been living in the USA from a young age.

Yeah. The brother of a friend was on the team that secured the building, and described having to walk past bleeding kids crying for help while they made sure there was no more shooting going on, and having to ignore the cell phones of the dead and injured. I gotta say, while I agree that the potential for senseless retribution is scary, and hate crimes despicable, I think the saddest thing about the murder of dozens of people is, well, the murder part.

For the record, I've been specifically avoiding reading such graphic and grisly accounts. I've read enough descriptions of bloody massacres in the histories of umpteen wars, conflicts, and senseless butcheries to last me several lifetimes.

This piece on Morning Edition yesterday did not cover any of the grisly details, but it stopped me in my tracks and left mbe bawling in my car for a couple of minutes: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9615639

So I guess that is the saddest thing I've heard about the events this week, or at least the most compelling.

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