I wasn't going to post on this

[muckefuck]

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.

Comments

[gopower.livejournal.com]

I don't think the point about canceling classes is at all fair. Nearly all murders are just that -- a killing of a specific, almost always singular, target, not a rampage. If someone were killed in the building next door, I hardly expect that my office would close (and Virginia Tech covers some 2000 acres -- that's like saying Millennium Park should be evacuated if there were a shooting in the Sears Tower). There might be some cordoning off if the police were in hot pursuit, but that did not appear to be the case here. After the first shooting was reported, there was no special reason to believe that there was additional danger.