Death-Wish | Don’t Demonise Cho

The release of Cho’s video all over the media is just another example of technology being used without proper restraint, not unlike the shooting itself. It’s a horrific violation of those suffering.

In a previous post, and in the comments that followed, I was trying to probe a link between these killings and the spate of gun and knife attacks between black teenagers that have beset London. I wonder now, having seen Cho’s video, whether the link is that they have a death-wish. Meaning they wanted to die?

No. But when a society devalues someone’s life so systematically, then it can seem that dying – or killing – is the only way to find some sort of ‘worth’, however twisted that worth might be.

This is not, as he might think, death as sacrifice – giving oneself, but death as transaction – the highest price to pay to make people sit up and notice this troubled self that thinks itself invisible. And the tragedy of his tirade against Christians is that it is precisely these people who follow one who gave himself in death to bring us worth, did not pass on that grace to him.

We should not demonize him, but search ourselves and try to empathize. It’s only out of empathy that this will be stopped from happening again. It takes courage, but, once again, it’s about taking a visit to our own ‘dirt pile’, seeing what we’ve excluded, and bringing some redemption from it.

Technorati: Cho Seung-hui | Death Wish | Empathy | suicide