Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board
Voicelessness and Emotional Survival => Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board => Topic started by: CB123 on April 16, 2007, 07:31:52 PM
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Hi all,
I've been watching the news, off and on, today and keep thinking of those of you who are in Virginia. I remember that a few weeks back, several of you were talking about living there, moving there, or having grown up there.
Just wanted to tell you that my heart goes out to you all and your state. Having kids on campus, I can imagine the fear and pain of the parents of these kids. Much love to you all.
CB
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CB,
I have a child at University and this is so sad such scary stuff.
My heart goes out to all the families.
moonlight
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Awful stuff!! Moon, you have a child at Virginia Tech!! Yhowey!!!! I don't think my friends from Virginia have kids there. Why didn't they lock down that place after the first two murders.................?????They are going to get so much stuff!!
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Hey oc ,
I do have a child at University but not Virginia tech .
Another state
But those families ..... I can not imagine such pain...
They should have done a lock down....
moon
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My daughter just took a semester off and some kid fell into a lake in a drunken stupor and drowned. It doesnt matter where you are - a murder can happen anywhere.
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My son lives in NYC and was attending college there during 9/11. You can imagine what that was like to be calling him for hours and hours that day only to get a recording that said, "The number you are dialing cannot be reached due to a state of emergency in the area." The recordings varied though out the day and you could tell the operators were making them on the spur of the moment and just saying what they could to explain what was happening. We didn't talk to him until about 10 o'clock that night when he was able to call us. It was the longest day. He watched from a window of one of the campus buildings on a hill in Brooklyn as the towers came down. When we talked to him at first, he was so quiet we could barely hear him. We called him every day for several days until we could hear his voice gaining in strength and volume. Then we thought he would be okay. I was very worried that his depression would get out of control because of what happened. Fortunately, he was both physically safe and emotionally okay. I kept remembering 9/11 when we were watching the news last night about Va. Tech. What a tragedy this is.
Pennyplant
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PP,
I know what you mean. I also kept thinking of 9/11 while watching the news.
I'm horrified. I called my kids right away to tell them I love them. Life is not to be taken for granted which I sometimes forget.
Love
Deb
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Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
and the shooter was a 'loner'
JUST AS I AM-------
Izzy
[attachment deleted by admin]
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A friend's son is a dorm RA (resident advisor) at Va. Tech and was in the next building.
It's weighing very heavily in our little circle.
I believe this culture is devouring itself, and this is like (as someone said on NPR today) the Imus moment about gun violence.
Perhaps that is the only hope, that some serious reckoning with what the culture has become will begin.
Hops
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Not to worry CB,
Not all loners are mass murderers! I thought that was a stereotypical word! and covers many older senior citizens.
I am sorry you were 'alarmed'! ??
Izzy
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It sounds like the shooter was seriously mentally ill. I hope discussions will begin on how this country handles mental and emotional illness. There were signs something was wrong with him for several years according to some articles I have read.
Pennyplant
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I wasnt alarmed, Izzy.
CB
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Watched Sky news where there was a professor of psychology intereviewd and he talked about NARCISSISTIC people in the context of the shooter. The description of him was scary, loner, socially inept, blaming, angry......... now who does that remind me of!!
Heartfelt sympathy to anyone who is affected by this tragedy and the families.
axa
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It was just announced, a short while ago, that the shooter had mailed a package to NBC News during those two hours between the dorm shootings and the Norris Hall shootings. What little I saw struck me as a Narcissist IN THE EXTREME!!! Even the newscasters were referring to "Narcissistic Injury". They showed only a tiny portion of what they received while the FBI is analyzing the rest. IT IS CHILLING!!!!!
Bones
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This young man held hatred ,rage and bitterness in his heart ....................... and then pushed himself into madness.
So very very sad so very sad.This kind of rage is incomprehensible................
moonlight
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So when I heard of this, away up in Canada, I said to myself, "OMG. This is horrific!" I thought a bit about the dead students and the parents' grief and the fact that the shooter killed himself---- waned off a bit in wondering about closure for the families----
Then I told my Therpaist that, and that I thought, "It has nothing to do with me" "Life goes on no matter what".
I thought of when Joe died and no one in my family was interested at all. "It had nothing to do with them'---it was just my daughter's father and I had loved him. We were alone in our grief on that side, but not with his family.
My Therpaist said that I was not abnormal in my thinking re this. I was glad to hear that. It is SO far away, in another country, and somewhat like hearing about a soldier being killed overseas.....there is a sad thought for what has happened but one still has to nuke the coffee and get the kids dressed for school.
"Life goes on!" ...................and I hate that but it does!
Izzy
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I recall one commentator on TV tonight saying she is convinced that he had been sexually abused for a long period of time.
I know he wears and merits all the labels, murderer, N, monster...but they're just words. Places to put the anger.
When I saw him, I kept thinking, poor kid. About him. The victims break my heart, their families...
The loss of all the others, the grief of all the others, is very real to me. But so is he. I wonder what he went through in that townhouse with his family. What made his face go blank and his mind go mad.
Hops
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Uh, before we start accusing his relatives of one of the most abominable acts possible, without the slightest evidence whatsoever, perhaps we ought to stop and think about things.
Many psychos grow up in relatively reasonable and normal homes and some of their most pitiable victims are often their own parents. That may very well be the case here.
Whatever the case he made the choices and commited the acts. I'll save my pity for the victims until I learn otherwise.
mud
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I don't know what to say. I'm not sure of my thoughts. How can one ever be. He is gone. We can only speculate what went through his mind.
I had worked with mentally ill people. I have seen them go off their meds. Sabatoge their own meds. Delusional to the point of thinking other people were sabotaging their meds. Mafia was breaking into their homes. They did self inflicted wounds to themselves. Shotguns being set up with a trigger to whomever went into their house would be shot if they hit the booby trap. They saw people in their house, they spoke about how they were tortured showed me the deep wounds on them told me how they were held down by the others and tortured. They were terrified and was going to do whatever it took to fight and keep these people out. It was all a delusion but very real to them. They really saw these things. This was real for them and being done to them, *in their minds*.
I have had been told a woman had been killed with a red dress on by their house, a prostitute. It increased as he spoke to 3 women all with red dresses. I was wearing a red dress, I was pregnant and it was a direct threat. It was coming out of his delusional mind of his twisted *reality* His family did try to get him hospitalized, yet he had done nothing criminal, yet.
Eventually he was when he was reported to have a gun and going to shoot everyone up. He was not in reality. He was trapped in his tortured, twisted, delusional mind.
So what I am saying is there could of been nothing that his family had done for him to become this way. He was just mentally ill, delusional, a psycho like Mud said.
My sympathy's are with the victims.
Love
Deb
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I have sympathy for the victims too.
Hope I'm not a sicko but I also feel sadness for him.
I don't know if he was abused...that was a TV commentator.
I just wonder whether there were endogenous factors. I know it's just speculation.
It's certainly not excuses for him, I'd just like to understand.
For example, I'm not mad at him for making videos and writing sick manifestos.
The kid grew up with our own media. ("Our" meaning the culture's.) So he
internalized what was appropriate for him...like everybody from the Unibomber on, and before...
I can't hate him. That's what's odd. Just can't summon any anger.
I feel sorrow for the victims and frustration at our inept mental health care and
the way bureaucracies don't help. But I don't really blame anyone.
He's morally accountable crazy or not and they're all still dead.
:(
Hops PS--if I was going to be mad, it'd be at the media. They chose to show it.
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Hops, I'm in near total agreement with you here. The point where I differ with you is that I am virtually certain that this kid WAS abused, and abused badly, by someone, and betrayed on top of it by someone who was 'supposed' to help him.
This type of ideation, this level of fury, simply does not arise ex nihilo. Something happened to this kid. I know, I know, people have delusions and kill out of total insanity. But they're rarely FURIOUS when they do that, they usually do it out of absolute fear. It's the rage that's the tipoff. This kid's rage came from somewhere. Something really, really, really bad happened to this kid.
Look at his situation in the college, for instance. The kid was ostracized. People shunned him. My god, his own suitemates never spoke to him?
Yes, he behaved in ways that put people off. But which came first? Was he shunned and ostracized all his life? Did he have any chance to learn how to interact socially? The ranting about Jesus was pretty disturbing too... it makes me wonder if his family was strict in the religious sense, if there was pressure to 'cover up' bad things for the sake of appearances...
this kid was voiceless with a vengeance, he hardly ever spoke above a whisper, reportedly... and when he found a voice, it was horrendous: the poetry, the plays, and ultimately, the wrath of his own personal Judgement Day, and a slaughter of total innocents.
Such a waste, such an awful awful waste.
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Hops,
No you are not a sicko for feeling sadness.
I do not blame anyone for this either (well except him) he did the killing insane or not. The media bothers me somewhat.
The part that bothered me the most was the first video that the student took where you heard the gun shots over and over again. They played it what about every 4 to 5 mins. They even counted the shots. (27) If it was at my children's campus I would have been NUTS OUT OF MY MIND WITH TERROR!! I can't imagine these poor parents/family members who could not contact their children. The terror of wondering if those shots you were hearing were hitting your child. And not a damn thing you could do about it. Maybe not even close enough to get there in a hurry. I could see me like some psycho heading for the airlines as I heard those shots consistently in my head.
That I thought was very insensitive. I know it's breaking news but my God! It just really bothers me.
Love
Deb
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I also get the feeling this guy was abused, but not necessarily by his parents. It could have been anyone. I also feel bad for him, as well as his victims. There were so many things that could have been differently, but it sounds like there were people that tried, but he was too far gone by that time to let anyone help him.
I read some of the bio's of the victims that were killed. Such an amazing group of people--what a loss.
I also think that it showed incredibly bad judgment for the media to show the videotapes. They made this guy "famous" now, and a "role model" for the next troubled youth looking to violence as an answer.
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I would agree that it might not have been a parent.
the worst part is that the kid was so obviously bright. which means that he could see very clearly many of the features of his personal hell, and would have had enough imagination to be able to conclude that important adults CHOSE not to help him, back whenever.
doesn't matter who they were or why they didn't help. he was bright enough to know that they could have found a way to help if they'd wanted to.
if it had been important to them.
so he punished the entire universe, at least as much of it as he could reach.
i keep thinking of Timothy McVeigh in all this. Ted Kaczynski. Bright - even brilliant - and horrendously embittered. And ultimately it turned them into monsters.
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Found this article.
Cho's silence worried family, relatives say
April 19, 2007
By BO-MI LIM
ASSOCIATED PRESS
SEOUL, South Korea — Cho Seung-hui was a worry to his family because he didn’t speak much as a child, his uncle said Thursday, and there were even concerns he might be mute.
But there were no early indications that the South Korean student who killed 32 people and himself at Virginia Tech had serious problems, said the uncle, who requested to be identified only by his last name, Kim.
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Cho “didn’t talk much when he was young. He was very quiet, but he didn’t display any peculiarities to suggest he may have problems,” Kim told the Associated Press in a telephone interview. “We were concerned about him being too quiet and encouraged him to talk more.”
Cho left South Korea with his family in 1992 to seek a better life in the United States, Kim said. The family never visited their homeland, and Kim said he did not recognize his nephew when his picture appeared on television as the shooter in the deadliest massacre in U.S. history.
“I am devastated,” Kim said between heavy sighs. “I don’t know what I can tell the victims’ families and the U.S. citizens. I sincerely apologize ... as a family member.”
In South Korea, Cho’s parents ran a small bookstore in Seoul, Kim said. The family lived in a two-room apartment no larger than 430 square feet.
“They had trouble making ends meet in Korea. The bookstore they had didn’t turn much profit,” Kim said.
He said his sister — Cho’s mother — occasionally called around holidays, but never mentioned having any problems with her son.
“She said the children were studying well. She didn’t seem worried about her children at all,” Kim said. “She just talked about how hard she had to work to make a living, to support the children.”
He said he has been unable to reach Cho’s mother since Monday’s massacre.
She and her husband now work at a dry cleaners in suburban Washington.
As a schoolboy in the United States, Cho’s speech problems and shyness made him a target for bullying and ridicule, former classmates said.
The South Korean immigrant almost never opened his mouth and would ignore attempts to strike up a conversation, said Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior who graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va., with Cho in 2003.
When Cho read out loud in class, other students laughed at his strange, deep voice that sounded “like he had something in his mouth,” Davids said.
In a video Cho mailed to NBC in the middle of his rampage at Virginia Tech, the 23-year-old portrays himself as persecuted and rants about rich kids.
Cho’s maternal grandfather also told South Korean newspapers that relatives were concerned about Cho not talking much as a child.
Cho “troubled his parents a lot when he was young because he couldn’t speak well, but was well-behaved,” the grandfather, who was identified by only his last name Kim, told the Dong-a Ilbo daily.
The family was worried that Cho might even be mute, the 81-year-old grandfather said in a separate interview with Hankyoreh newspaper.
In an editorial Thursday, the Hankyoreh said Cho’s case reflected problems faced by many South Korean immigrants in the United States.
“It is the reality of our immigrants that parents are so busy making a living that it’s not easy for them to have dialogue with young children,” the newspaper wrote.
“We should think about whether our society or our community abroad has been negligent in preventing conditions that could lead to such an aberration,” it said.
In Seoul, more than 1,000 people sang hymns and prayed for Cho’s victims at a special service at Myeongdong Cathedral, some fighting back tears. White flowers, candles and a U.S. flag adorned a small table in the center of the chapel.
“As a mother myself, my heart really aches as if it happened to my own children,” said Bang Myung-lan, a 48-year-old housewife, holding back tears. “As a Korean, I am deeply sorry for the deceased.”
Cardinal Nicolas Cheong Jin-suk urged parishioners to work together to prevent a recurrence of “such an unfortunate event.”
“Among the 32 killed were bright students who could have contributed greatly to society, and it’s a big loss for all of us,” the cardinal said. “As a South Korean, I can’t help feeling apologetic about how a Korean man caused such a shocking incident.”
“It is beyond my understanding how such a thing can occur — especially to think a Korean is responsible for this,” said 68-year-old Lee Chun-ja after the service. “It really tears my heart. Something like this should never happen again.”
Deb
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Stormy,
Ted Kacyzynski was not abused and grew up in a normal home. Ditto for Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and Tim McVeigh.
Maybe this guy was abused. Maybe he wasn't. We simply don't know. Sometimes people are ostracized for the very understandable reason that they're menacing, frickin weirdos who are an inevitable train wreck waiting to happen.
The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Sometimes that's all there is to the story.
mud
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Reduced to mere words, I think it's not a wicked heart.
I think a broken heart and a broken mind produce these things.
Those are semantics, I know. And theology, and philosophy.
This is deep stuff, the nature of evil vs./illness/etc.
So much vocabulary to straddle. I'm not smart enough.
But as long as hearts are present, I'm glad we try.
Hops
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Hi mud
But remember - abuse doesn't only occur in childhood, and people can be abused past their breaking point even as adults. In fact, sometimes abuse in adulthood devastates a person precisely because nothing in their childhood prepared them to deal with it.
There are more than enough people here on this site who can attest to the impact of abuse in adulthood...
and the choice to do evil in response to abuse is even more destructive when made by a fully grown and fully aware adult.
I just found this in the article Deb quotes:
As a schoolboy in the United States, Cho’s speech problems and shyness made him a target for bullying and ridicule, former classmates said.
The South Korean immigrant almost never opened his mouth and would ignore attempts to strike up a conversation, said Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior who graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va., with Cho in 2003.
When Cho read out loud in class, other students laughed at his strange, deep voice that sounded “like he had something in his mouth,” Davids said.
So... he was a target for bullying and ridicule. For how many years, I wonder. This isn't something he experienced for the first time at University. Not by a long chalk.
Again, I'm not arguing in his defense, Mud. Just pointing out that he was, indeed, abused.
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The news is describing how he was humiliated in grade school and the school teachers simply just gave up on him and passed the problem on to someone else.
Bones
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I remember another suggestion in the media that he might have been autistic.
And something's coming on now about a strange relationship with his mother (but I don't know what).
Oh. It was a great-aunt who said he wouldn't respond to her and his mother was always worried about him,
that he had psychological problems as a young child. Then she called him an idiot.
They didn't emigrate until he was 8 years old.
There can be enormous pressure from immigrant parents for a child to perform.
If, say, he was autistic or schizophrenic or plain brain-damaged, but bright enough to make it to
graduate school in engineering, and because of his personality and illness he neither had nor could
make any friends so had no companion other than his rage...and you add the pressures of school
and hormones and loneliness and academic stress and insanity and fixation on blame...
Mud, hon...does this really add up to wicked, do you think?
You know me, I stumble over the vocabulary of evil and judgment. Hmm.
Maybe it's because I too was socially isolated for years as a kid, and at the bottom of the pecking
order, and suffered a good deal from bullying. I just about broke in two from sadness, and I
had an Nish mother but a kind father, and I wasn't physically neglected.
I saw a clip of his family home in Seoul, two dirty rooms...
Okay, now I'm mad. At Ronald Reagan for eviscerating the mental health system in this country.
Okay, now I'm done being mad.
I feel witless. As much as I sense the community's grief, here's a thing:
I don't feel any more grief for the victims at Tech than I do for the 200 dead in Baghdad today.
And the media disconnect, the oddness of the outpourings over the college children and nothing
personal, no stories...about Iraqi civilians or our young soldiers...
It's the personal stories, the ability to imagine them dying because I too am a white American
who could have attended such a school, so it's not hard to imagine being there, going through it.
In some ways it reminds me of the trauma that colored college, because I was near DC and the
Viet Nam War was at full throttle, and my brother was there and friends were killed.
Sorry for the rambling. I am feeling a little guilty. I don't feel as connected as I should be.
The diet of media violence. I watch too much TV. Maybe it's as numbing as I thought.
Hops
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Hello, All-
You have all so eloquently discussed this issue. I just read this thread after my idealistic little Pollyanna self posted elsewhere. For some reason, I thought of what someone said about the personal is the political or is it the other way around? Actually I think the original meaning was for it to read both ways?
I think it is very important that we all do first what everyone on this board is doing. But then what? My H and I were having a discussion about the issues related to Duke, Rutgers, etc. before the VT horror. He got a bit aggravated by my passionate discussion, I think and he ended up saying that nothing can be done about it anyway. I told him that if there was a way to join some group of Freedom Riders in relation to certain issues I would. I got the impression he thought I was being silly.
I am middle aged, so I do know that no one can do anything alone, and I also know the importance of saving that one little starfish as the little girl did in the story, though there are millions on the beach.
During the Civil Rights Movement, Kent State, etc. I was young, and have still not looked into all the history, but would the good things have been accomplished as quickly without public awareness made possible by broadcasting it?
Does it count, what we're doing by having this dicussion, or is it a mild version of standing by and doing nothing and letting evil triumph?
I fall into numbness, cynicism, and apathy at times, so how can I judge anyone else who does?
Does it count when I speak my thoughts in public, or am I just tsk tsking, and it goes nowhere?
Does the good old writing your congressman do any good?
Thanks for my brief soapbox, everyone-
cats paw
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Hi to you too Stormy,
You may very well be right that he was bullied. But there has to be something more than just bullying to cause one person to go postal while some other kid on the same playground being bullied in precisely the same manner turns out to be a model citizen.
Timothy McVeigh was apparently called a beanpole and given a swirly while in grade school. I believe many thousands of other kids are given the same treatment every year, but I only know of one who blew up a federal building.
I recently read the Columbine pair were not ostracized but were fairly popular, mainstream kids who created their personas of being shunned outcasts in their own minds.
I suspect each one of these mass or serial murderers has had a unique combination of experiences that may contribute to their sprees, or that they use to justify them. But every person who is wronged has to choose between living in spite of the abuse or descending into a fantasy world of self pity and going out in a blaze of glorious retaliation against those whom they know to be innocent victims. If abuse was the determining factor the world would be full to the brim with these types. As it is the world is much more full of people who despite enduring a lot worse abuse than these lunatics manage to survive and even thrive without having their body count and suicide note full of petty grievances making the headlines.
I understand the desire to gain insight into their behavior and to condemn whatever abuse others may or may not have heaped on these few lunatics. But let's not lose sight of the fact that these people are the ultimate bullies. And in attempting to understand them let's not risk dishonoring the many who have been more severely abused and have resisted the temptation to lash out at the world and instead have striven to heal and do good to others not murder them. I haven't read anything these people have endured that compares to the abuse a good number of the people here have.
I don't believe one of the murderers we have spoken of was so mentally ill that they were absolved of legal responsibility for their crimes. They knew what they were doing was wrong and they chose to do it anyway. Not only does it dishonor their victims and their families to lay a portion of the blame elsewhere, it doesn't even give the murderers their proper due. They knowingly chose evil and pursued it. I choose to acknowledge their choice by laying the responsibility solely where I think it belongs; at their feet. I think it trivializes the choice they have made to place the blame elsewhere and it devalues the choice for good that others make when they resist the tempatations of evil. And I'm afraid that the more we endorse the idea that our moral choices are outside of our control the easier we make it for those marginal people facing the choice between good and evil to make the wrong choice.
mud
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Hi all:
Been reading along this thread and thinking a lot. I keep thinking of my friend.
She was one of the sweetest people I ever knew. Kind. Friendly. Polite. Generous. Giving. So very faithful and she relied on God so much. She would offer hope to anyone who was lacking and she would give the clothes off her back, if she thought it would stop someone's suffering. I know these things because I saw the way she treated people and I know the way she treated me. She was a gentle and loving soul.
We were very close. Told eachother our deepest stuff. She babysat my girls, sometimes for me, to give me a break, when they were younger. She was fun and creative and joyful, so much of the time. We had many laughs together and enjoyed many simple pleasures side by side for many years.
But she had dark secrets. Lived through horrible traumas and had been hospitalized ....breaking down mentally. She was on medication, which seemed to work for years and years. She loved her sons, her friends, her pets and worked in a helping field, going into people's homes and helping them. She did a wonderful job and received many accolades. She was well-loved by many.
Then some more trauma happened (I don't want to put the details here because I'd feel like I was disrespecting her privacy....making it possible for someone to identify her). NO I won't do that! But terrible trauma.....emotional....happened again.
And she killed herself by burning her house down with her pets in it.
Did she really make an evil choice?
The woman I knew was not capable of making such a choice.
The woman I knew would give her life rather than harm a poor, defenseless pet.
The woman I knew had courage and a heart of gold.
My opinion:
Anyone of us......everyone of us.......is capable. We all have a breaking point. There is a place so deep and dark and forboding......that will allow any person in.....when the time is right...and once there, we are all capable of horrendous acts. And it is possible for all to be driven there.
To get to that point......the mind goes nuts....or in and out of reality. The soul goes numb....or ceases to be aware. And all that is left is the pain. Function is fueled by pain only. And whether that pain is expressed by psychotic delusions and ravaging rage or by sheer despair and torment.......
the result is similar.
I think we are all capable, which is the scariest thought of all.
What stops some people? Many never reach that breaking point because not enough stuff happens to push them there? Or many people never get that hurt? Or by the grace of God many are simply stronger or luckier or something??
What do I know? Not much. I know my friend had to have been out of her mind to behave like that. And I bet these others.....were out of their's too.
How else can we define insanity? Sane people just don't act like that, do they?
Maybe our definition of insane needs to change?
I just don't believe a person can be sane and do such things. Make a conscious, sane choice. Maybe a conscious choice but not a sane one. They are aware of what they are doing.....but their brain just does not compute that it is insane. It makes perfect sense to them because the wires in their brains are broken, burnt up, missing or otherwise not functioning.
Does that happen to evil people?
My friend was not an evil person. She was a good person. A very sick person, I believe, when she acted so insanely.
So, I find it hard to condemn people who behave in insane ways because I really think that is how to define such behaviour and that one must be insane to act/behave that way. I feel sorry that they broke and acted as they did. I think of their families and wonder if they are victims too? Or part of the breaking process? Stuff drives people insane, sometimes, and it's not their fault. Sometimes, it's not anyone's fault, it's just where the breaking point happens to be. Every one of us has a different tolerance of pain.....a different pain threshold. Who can say where their's is? Or that they will never reach it?
For the victims and their families, I feel deep empathy and sorrow. They happened to be in the wrong the place at the wrong time, just like my friend's pets. I believe these are selfish acts because no one else is considered when they are perpetrated. The person may or may not be aware that they are acting strictly to satisfy their own selfish desires. In that way, we are all a little insane, sometimes. Who does not have selfish desires? So even the victims may wish to retaliate and some......might.
And the cycle of abuse continues.
Most won't and that's the good news. Most will try to survive and heal and some might go on to do incredible things......powerful, helpful, fantastic stuff that makes the world a better place!
It's a reaction to pain, I think. Both types of behaviour. And extreme reactions are possible in either direction.
What decides the direction, might be the real question?
Sela
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As sad and horrific as the events in Virginia this week were, we have to be mindful of how lucky we (those of us in most of the industrialized world, at least) are that events such as that are rare. We don't live in a part of the world where on a daily basis we could be blown up at any minute by someone who has so much anger and hatred in their souls that they will strap a bomb to their bodies and detonate it in a public place, with the sole intention of killing as many innocent victims--young and old alike--as they can.
How can we explain a mentality which allows for an act such as that to be OK and, in fact, celebrated? How do we make that mentality stop? It doesn't even seem to be slowing down. Young people are jumping on that band wagon in growing numbers and we are helpless to change that mindset. That's something which really frightens me.
Brigid
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Oh Sela.
There is a story.
I am sorry. What a tragedy.
I guess that's what I'm fumbling to say.
I just picture just about every human being in diapers, and I have a hard time hating for more than 5 minutes.
Hops
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The more I hear, the more I'm leaning toward the possibility of paranoid schizophrenia...the flat affect, delusions of persecution in connection with this college mates, the verbal ramblings that don't make any sense.....that's my diagnostic impression.
Bones
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Bones,
I was thinking that also.
Love
Deb
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Bones,
Is that a chemical disorder? I don't know a lot about some of these diagnoses--I know some are not really related to environment but to actual changes in brain chemicals. Do we know enough to know if it is genetic?
CB
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Bones,
I was thinking that also.
Love
Deb
Thanks, Deb.
Bones
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Bones,
Is that a chemical disorder? I don't know a lot about some of these diagnoses--I know some are not really related to environment but to actual changes in brain chemicals. Do we know enough to know if it is genetic?
CB
I recall reading about twin studies that indicate that schizophrenia can be genetic. Something goes wrong with the brain chemistry that results in schizophrenia. Paranoid schizophrenia can be the worst illness when the individual becomes a danger to self and others.
Bones
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Fifty years ago were there mass killings of kids in schools?
What has changed?
Where is personal responsibility?
Was there no mental illness 50 years ago?
Were people not abused 50 years ago?
Were young men not angry 50 years ago?
These are the questions I am left with.
I think in many ways society has improved in the intervening time but I also think in many ways society has disimproved greatly.
We all make mistakes, we are angry but most of us do not go out and kill another. Why because it is WRONG. We choose not to do it because it is wrong. Many people with mental illness do not abuse, hurt, kill others. To buy guns with the intent to kill another human being is wrong. It is a choice.
I am with Mud on this one.
I think in some ways we as a society have become so "understanding" we have lost sight of right and wrong. I am sorry that that young man felt so much anger and pain but he choose to do what he did. He had a choice in ending his own life, those other kids did not want to die. I don't hate him, hating him makes no difference but my compassion is with the families of the dead kids.
Some part of me feels it is just how it is now. This is the way we live. This is the society we are all contributing to.
This is our reality.
axa
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Don't forget the whole concept of schizophrenogenesis. There is a reason that certain behavior is called 'crazy-making'.
Isn't it wrong for kids to be allowed to torment and mock other kids, beat them up, and even throw them in Dumpsters while yelling racial slurs at them? Isn't it even more wrong for adults to watch all this and NEVER DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT? [The obvious interpretation being, they secretly support and endorse it.]
What do you expect from people who are treated that way ALL THEIR LIVES? Awe-inspiring sanity and grace? A Nobel Peace Prize?
I know what I am talking about, and I STILL have the scars on my back where my dear little schoolmates put out their cigarettes when I was in ninth grade. [My crime? Good grades, bad eyes (glasses) and reddish hair.]
I was lucky. I found a way to escape and I got therapy, and I never reached the point where I felt that innocent third parties deserved to suffer because of anything I had experienced.
But I know that helpless rage. I will never be able to forget what it felt like, to want to hit my tormentors back just as hard as I was hit. To want to do whatever it took to make sure they would never, never be able to hit, or mock, or torment me - or anyone like me - again.
Anybody who hasn't been through that has no right to tell me what to think about it. Not in my case, not in anyone else's.
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Practical view? - www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2059749,00.html (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2059749,00.html)
"Even posthumous attention beats being ignored."
We don't have many school shootings in the UK. We do have increasing knife-crime in schools though. I imagine I'd find it 'easier' to shoot someone with a gun, or several people with an automatic gun, than to kill them at close range by plunging a knife into their flesh.
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(((Stormy)))
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Um, folks... most of what I was describing above actually happened to this kid we're all talking about.
I was taunted, physically beaten, stalked before they had that name for it by brats who laid in wait for me on my way home from school, and yes, burned with cigarettes once when I wore a summer dress with a low back.
But the things I listed above, except for the cigarette burns, are all things that happened to this kid, and are now being reported in the papers.
That is the point I'm trying to make. It's all well and good for us to pontificate about how we'd never do any such thing, but we've never been put to the test the way he was, have we?
The fact is, we have no idea what we would do, if pushed all the way to the edge and beyond, and we also have no idea where our own edge is... never mind someone else's.
Bottom line - to me: If we don't want these things to happen, we have to stop accepting and condoning and enabling and even rewarding emotional abuse. That won't prevent hallucinating nutcases from doing crazy things with no motivator at all, but it would probably prevent more school and workplace violence than we want to admit.
And the very fact that we don't want to admit it helps to perpetuate it.
Portia, long time no see. Hope you are doing well. Thanks for the link, from which I've lifted this quote:
For a lucky few, school and college are where we first distinguish ourselves. But for the majority, they are the site of first humiliation, subjugation and injury. They are almost always our first introduction to brutal social hierarchies, as they may also sponsor our first romantic devastation. What better stage on which to act out primitive retribution?
This author 'gets it'. God help us, as a society, we still don't.
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Here's an article from the Focus on the Family website, about a book by Frank Peretti on the subject of bullying. Peretti was another lucky one... he found an escape route too.
I've put the full text here to save people an outclick, but if anyone wants to go to the site, there are related articles, so I'll put the link below.
link: http://www.family.org/parenting/A000001215.cfm
The Wounded Spirit
Many adults carry some kind of psychological hurt from their childhood years.
by Tom Neven
Bullying. It’s a childhood rite of passage. Just ignore it. You’ll get over it.
Except most likely you won’t. Frank Peretti knows this firsthand. He’s one of the many walking wounded who suffered at the hands of classmates — and sometimes teachers. His is a wounded spirit, and he believes a large number of adults carry some kind of psychological hurt from their childhood years. And the cycle continues. A recent study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association found that nearly a third of children in sixth through 10th grades had either bullied or been bullied.
The best-selling author of supernatural thrillers such as This Present Darkness, The Visitation and The Oath, the 50-year-old Peretti did not have a very pleasant childhood. His was a loving home; the problem came at school but grew from much earlier roots.
Shortly after birth Peretti was diagnosed with cystic hygroma, a growth on the side of his neck that grew so large it threatened to strangle him. Barely two months old, he was rushed to the hospital, where doctors tried to remove as much of the mass as possible. After 10 days in the hospital, he went home, "a tiny bag of bones with a long scar and black sutures that made it appear as if my head had been nearly severed and then sewn back on," he says.
Peretti underwent many surgeries in the following years, and because of his physical struggles his body did not mature as quickly as other children’s. Aside from the scar on his neck, the most obvious symptom of his malady was his tongue: swollen to the point it stuck out of his mouth, black, scabby and oozing. If Peretti ever wanted to forget about it, his classmates were sure not to let him. Not only was his tongue grotesque, but it left him with a speech impediment.
A virtual prison
Peretti describes his junior high school years, particularly the physical education classes, in harrowing terms. Going into the locker room meant sure torment from the stronger boys — just about everyone, that is. Being slammed up against lockers. Snapped with wet towels. Name-calling. And a coach who seemed not to notice or care. He felt trapped.
Peretti grew up in a Christian home, and "what you learned at home, you conducted yourself accordingly at school: You obey your teachers, you do what the teachers tell you."
Peretti blames the school system’s sense that "that’s just the way things are" for some of what he endured. "There’s the idea that somehow manliness is equated with cruelty; if you’re cruel, if you’re tough, if you one-up everybody physically, that makes you a man," he says. "That’s the way it was in gym class anyway. The teacher’s demeanor just permeated the rest of the class. But in that environment, that suck-it-up, no-pain, be-a-man environment, you’re not going to complain about being picked on. And Mom and Dad said I had to be there. The teachers said I had to be there. No one, not one adult anywhere, said, ‘You know what, Frank? What’s happening to you is wrong. You shouldn’t be putting up with that.’"
The bullying extended beyond the school yard. At a neighborhood store, where a classmate worked, Peretti needed help finding the deodorant aisle. The boy took him there and pretended to be helpful, picking up a spray can and asking if that was what he needed — just before spraying the deodorant in Peretti’s face. In pain and humiliation, Peretti stumbled outside, collapsed on the curb and cried from the deep anguish in his soul.
He retreated into his own world at home, picking up an interest in movie monsters such as Frankenstein and the Creature From the Black Lagoon. "What made monsters cool to me was they were ugly," he says. "They were rejected. They were misunderstood. They were picked on, but the thing about monsters I liked was they seemed to have some kind of control over the situation. They weren’t victims. They made victims."
But one teacher finally made a difference. It was something as simple as noticing a downcast young boy and taking the time to ask a simple question: How are you doing? Such concern from an authority figure was a revelation to Peretti, and it inspired him to write a note to the gym teacher, detailing what he had to suffer every day in P.E. class.
"I wrote pages and pages," Peretti says. "I worked on it every free moment that day. I worked on it at home. I just prayed so much when I was writing the letter." He then put the multiple-paged, single-spaced, both-sides-of-the-paper note in the teacher’s mail slot.
A few days later, the gym teacher gruffly called Peretti into his office. Peretti was expecting the worst. Incredibly, the coach and a guidance counselor had arranged for Peretti to be exempted from P.E. "He was real kind," Peretti says of the teacher, still sounding a bit amazed. "He smiled at me. I told him, ‘If you were a girl, I’d kiss you.’ He just smiled back and said, ‘You’re welcome.’ It just took one teacher to care. One teacher to ask me how I was and not make excuses and shrug it off."
Peretti believes more teachers and principals need to show such concern. While in no way excusing Dylan Klebold or Eric Harris, the two gunmen at Columbine High School, Peretti says he does in a way identify with them. "At Columbine, my word, the kids were slammed against lockers, they were squirted and pelted with food in the lunchroom. They were being run off the road by the jocks in their cars. There were kids actually getting to class by going outside the school building and circling around and coming in the other way so they wouldn’t be picked on in the hallways, and all this going on in a school environment, and nothing was done about it.
"If you’ve got the disposition to let anger fester, and that’s what happened with Klebold and Harris, something is going to happen. They had so much anger. These guys were pretty warped in the first place, but if I had that kind of disposition, and I was back in seventh grade, and I had Mr. _____ for a gym teacher, and I had a gun, who knows? I was a Christian, so I had a moral base to prevent me from doing anything like that."
But, he is quick to add, many children today do not have that base and are immersed in a culture of violence and decadence.
The making of a bully and a victim
"Where does it start?" Peretti asks. "At some point in a child’s life he becomes the inferior one, the different one, the ugly one, the fat one. For whatever reason that shapes the way he interacts. He becomes retiring, quiet — either that, or overly compensating and defensive. It’s like painting a sign around your neck: ‘Beat up on me because you’ll get away with it.’ You begin to expect to be treated that way, and the other kids pick up on that like an animal smelling prey."
And everyone, even victims, can in turn be bullies themselves.
"I think human nature, being what it is, it’s kind of the natural thing we do," he says. "It’s easy to be mean." He remembers one of his own victims, a boy in his Boy Scout troop. "I remember how I and the other scouts would make him the fall guy. I don’t think we were real cruel, but we were hard enough on him."
Girls can be bullies just as much as boys, he adds. "Boys are more into the physical stuff. The girls are more into the social. They’ll ostracize, insult, leave out, ignore, put down a girl."
Peretti divides bullies into two basic types. "One is the bully who bullies because he has a deep troubling need of his own. He’s picked on or he’s got a very unsuccessful life. Trouble at home, an underachiever, for whatever reason, he has a real need to elevate himself by picking on somebody else.
"The other kind of bully is the one you may not expect: the very successful kid. The good student, the athlete, the kid who has everything going for him. He falls into a trap of thinking it’s just the cool thing to do, especially with his friends."
Whichever type of bully, the results can have lasting implications. In Peretti’s case, they affected a major life decision. He had been accepted at Seattle Pacific University and was in a college office for administrative matters before the school year started.
"Some upperclassman came in — had his letterman’s jacket on, big guy — and immediately made some snide comment: ‘Oh, this must be a poor, dumb freshman.’ I went outside and said it’s not going to happen again. I am not going back to the seventh grade. I didn’t go to Seattle Pacific University. I didn’t go to college until I was 25. That was a life decision born out of a wound that began when I was a child."
And whether bully or bullied, the wounds are often carried for life. He cites a friend whose two boys were being harassed at a Christian school. What made it worse for the dad, however, was that he had been a bully during his school days.
"He said, ‘I’m on the other side of this. I still remember the names and faces of the kids I picked on, and I’m troubled today with their memory and the haunting question of whatever happened to them.
'Are they still carrying wounds that I put there?’"
The similarities here should make us all pause and think.
Peretti was one of the lucky ones.
By the way, I have his book. When I was being bullied out of a promising career where I work now, reading him, and Primo Levi, and Corrie ten Boom - validated me and kept me sane long enough to find a good and caring therapist.
I will be grateful to Frank Peretti for the rest of my eternal life.
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I seem to have hijacked this thread, and I want to set that right.
None of these posts are intended to be about me primarily. They're intended to be about bullying, about the long term effects on a human child of being immersed in an unremitting world of abuse and ostracism and mockery and cruel treatment, a world where adults are perfectly aware of what is going on and either don't care enough to intervene, or actually approve of it. [Please don't buy the excuse that maybe nobody knew what to do. People who give a damn don't let that stop them. They find out what to do, and they do it.]
They're intended to connect dots that our society and culture seemingly doesn't want people to connect - lest, God forbid, we learn something, grow, and change?
The proper response to an incident like VT or Columbine or any other such is not so much 'how could this happen?' or 'how do such monsters come to exist among us?'. The answers to those questions are right under our noses. It is because we ignore those answers that we have to keep asking the questions over and over.
The proper response is: there, but for the grace of God, go I.
And then to add human compassion and reason and action to the grace of God, for those others who have not received such grace... so they don't have to go the same way.
Read the article about Peretti, and think about that kid in Blacksburg. Really think about him. As a child. As a human being. Because he was. Before he was a walking horror, before he was a pit of rage and death, he was a child. He was a human being.
I'm dropping off this thread now; I've said pretty much all I can say.
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This just came to my mind and it gives me chills:
Paranoid schizophrenia plus being bullied/stalked/tortured in school for being "different" equals the ticking time bomb that exploded this past Monday.
I have personally witnessed some idiots deliberately torturing a schizophrenic because the idiots thought it was "fun". I was outraged and angered and would break it up every time I saw it.
Bones
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They talked about his having the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia on Larry King the other night. I also read that as a child he was suspected of having a mild form of autism. There was an English teacher that tried her best to get him to go to counseling, but he refused and they had no authority to force him into counseling. Even if they had, forced counseling usually doesn't work. His suitemate said at the beginning of the year they would try to talk to him, but he wouldn't respond at all. It's sad that there were so many opportunities for him to get help and he refused and the result is 33 dead.
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I found this touching tribute to Virginia Tech on you tube. It’s called If Everyone Cared. Here’s the link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBMMf0bhKqM
Here’s the chorus:
If everyone cared and nobody cried
if everyone loved and nobody lied
if everyone shared and swallowed their pride
then we’d see the day that nobody died.
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Hiya S&S:
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I think we have some in common. One thing you said got me wondering:
If the pain is worse I can imagine going off
the deep end. I think of it like that, not like "insane" which is really a blaming word.
I guess the sound of going off the deep end is less insulting to you? Insane is more blaming? I see what you mean, I think.
On the other hand......isn't the word insane just a way of identifying a certain thinking/behaviour type? To me, it almost seems like an excuse, rather than blaming. "OH he acted like that because he's gone insane, so it's not his fault" kinda thing.
And in a way......doesn't going off the deep end sound somewhat like a choice? Putting more blame on the person, sort of? I dunno. Just my brain going at it again.
Anyway.....no biggie. I was just thinking about what you said and wondering if the actual word makes a difference or not. What I mean is for people to act in certain ways.....they must be ....have to be......out of their minds. I just don't see a person of right mind acting like that. My friend was not in her right mind when she acted the way she did. I don't see how this fella who shot up Virginia Tech could possibly be in his right head either?
We can call it whatever we decide but it will never be normal, healthy behaviour brought on by a normal, healthy thoughts sifted through a normal, healthy mind, imo, and there is no nice term for it.
Sela