The Shootings and America

But what lessons, if any, can we learn from their pain? Does the Virginia Tech massacre reveal anything about the American psyche - its strengths, weaknesses and glaring contradictions? In the midst of the tragedy and the confusion, America leaves its distinctive and often conflicting signature.
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Cho's grotesque video testimony following his bloody massacre has to be one of the most chilling pitches for post-modern fame in a society just as much obsessed with celebrity as violence. Cho's pathology, it is clear, was nurtured through video games and on the web and yet it is in the very same sphere of cyberspace that much of the grieving and healing is now also taking place.
Then there is the ease with which he bought his 9mm Glock from a shop that had already sold weapons used in four previous murders - a fact which is alarming to say the least. The inability of the authorities to follow up on their suspicions and protect a young man with serious mental problems from himself and others should, one would imagine, be the most powerful of wake-up calls to the country that has been known to shoot first and ask later.
And yet the power of "family", as shown by 26,000 students at Virginia Tech to come together at this time, is as impressive as the civic spirit that survives such carnage. As an old sage once put it: "Everything you say about America is true. And the opposite.''
America prides itself on looking you in the eye and telling it as it is. How ironic, then, that the worst mass shooting in its history was committed by a young man who was so painfully shy that he avoided all eye contact, never spoke to his room-mate Joseph Aust, apparently had an imaginary girlfriend named "Jelly" and put a question mark into the students' year book instead of his name.