Virginia Tech and Cho Seung Hui: Love and Unhappiness in an Alien Culture by Jerry Kroth

Virginia Tech and Cho Seung Hui

By JERRY KROTH

The biggest massacre in U.S history stuns us. Senator Kennedy immediately issues appeals about gun control. Dianne Sawyer confronts the President of Virginia Tech to ask if he should resign. Many of the rest of us wonder about violence in our culture. We've killed more than 100,000 Iraqi citizens under George Bush and wounded half a million: If one lives by the sword, does one die by it?

All sorts of thoughts cross our minds. Everyone seems to be interviewing everyone. But I've noticed no one interviews David Geffen. Geffen is one of those quiet, silent, forces in American society which manufactures and distributes "gangsta rap." His old specialty was called "murder music." How apropos if Diane Sawyer shoved a microphone in the face of this engineer of violence, misogyny, and religious defamation, to ask a few questions. But Geffen lounges in his Malibu beach house not the slightest object of any media curiosity.

But perhaps that is as it should be, because when we come upon this assassin, Chow Seung Hui, we realize it was not media violence that lured and seduced him into this massacre. That might have been true of the Columbine killers, who deeply appreciated Geffen's contribution to American culture, but not so for Hui.

Hui was motivated by something else. He was deeply unhappy. He had no friends, none in high school, none in college. No friends in his entire adult life. He struggled with being Korean in a country which never accepted him. Never, in his mind, not ever.

And, sure, he wanted to have a girlfriend, but he didn't, not one, so he created an imaginary one. And in his virtual, insular world, he had a favorite song, one that he played over and over and over. I think it is appropriate to quote and read it in its entirety. This is what an assassin who killed 32 people on Monday listened to. It wasn't David Geffen's murder music after all. It was from Collective Soul:

Give me a word

Give me a sign

Show me where to look

Tell what will I find ( will I find )

Lay me on the ground

Fly me in the sky

Show me where to look

Tell me what will I find ( will I find )

Oh, heaven let your light shine down

Love is in the water

Love is in the air

Show me where to go

Tell me will love be there ( love be there )

Teach me how to speak

Teach me how to share

Teach me where to go

Tell me will love be there ( love be there )

Oh, heaven let your light shine down

I'm going to let it shine

Heavens little light gonna shine on me

Yea yea heavens little light gonna shine on me

Its gonna shine, shine on me.