Non Violence
I have been reading a little about the latest shooting in the US, this time it’s a university. It’s pretty bleak. I understand the teen angst behind high school shootings, but that should be gone by the time your in university surely.
Why did this person decide they wanted to kill 30 odd students at Virginia Tech?
From the SMH
“Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated and impaled upon the cross? Thanks to you I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenceless people,” Cho said, adding that, “When the time came, I did it. I had to.”
Sadly he missed the point of the cross. It was not Jesus killing people, but dying for them. Jesus embraced the path of non-violence and sacrificial love, and in doing so has inspired people for two thousand years.
Cho choose the path of violence, revenge, and insanity not the way of the Jesus.
I am wondering now how the concept of non-violence could be applied in the school yard, and in University. The idea of refusing to co-operate with bullies and the injustices within a school/university system appeals to me. I want a Ghandi of the school yard. I wonder if there was just one person who overcame the school system and turned their misery into victory. However I doubt they would get one line in the local newspaper for doing that. So their story would never get out.
It makes me think of how the crises driven media makes it easy to spot and make famous villains, but rarely shows a single hero…
Hmm… Our society is so sick.. Anyway better get back to work now.
April 19th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
It doesn’t seem to be about angst to me. Or not just angst. I think it runs a lot deeper. I lot of America’s most anti-social men are middle-aged.
I tend to think it’s more about lack of social integration, like all those social theorists have been saying for 100 years.
April 19th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
Yeah, I get the social integration bit too. It is a big part, what we really need is COMMUNITY!
Or even better NON/VIOLENT COMMUNITY!!!!
April 20th, 2007 at 1:39 am
I’m not sure about the social integration angle (I assume you are referring to the fact that he is a Korean born resident, Ryan?).
I imagine this is a factor, but I don’t find it fully explanatory. I went through some pretty powerful (and sometimes anti-social) emotional turbulence in my first few years of University. And loners of the majority culture have committed such atrocities in the past (e.g. Columbine).
It seems to me that we’re looking at a really tangled web of contributing factors: mental illness, lack of effective supportive structures, the irreconcilable dichotomy of conformity to majority group norms and idealisation of the individual (loner), as well as a culture of violence and legislative laxity on gun access that borders on the criminally insane.