Why Cho did it and why journalists don’t get it

Everyone is wondering. I’m not. I could never have done what he did, but I understand it.

I heard a comedian utter this joke, and I’ll alter it somewhat in parentheses: “I don’t condone (wife beating, child beating, husband killing etc.), but I understand it.” Watching the news coverage of this lonely man who became a monster, I recognized him, I knew what he was. He was a young man in his own world of strong opinions about things, and he valued those opinions. No one else did. Didn’t like them, in fact. What was there to like? Doesn’t matter. All that matters is that he had no one to share them with. No friends.

That can make you crazy.

Cho failed to see his own responsibility for this state of affairs. He was too selfish and expected people to come to him. That never works. One must reach out to others, and learn to live peacefully with the large amount of compromise that this requires.

I was never that lonely, but I was lonely. There were friends around me who liked what I liked, but not many. We liked what we liked a lot and thought it was necessary for all people to value what we valued, and if they didn’t we deemed them to be shallow. We thought we were deep. Social clubs arise from this kind of thinking, then movements, and when they get to be a certain size they inevitably try to take over their locality. They try to make everyone else see what they see and behave accordingly, to shape their surrounding society according to their vision. Many of these movements then try to take over the world. Communism, radical Islam, Environmentalism, Democracy, vegetarians, racial supremacists – the list goes on. Many of these things, perhaps all of them, have what their followers believe to be good intentions. That doesn’t matter; it only matters that they are wrong, because there is no system of thought that works for everyone. Resistance will be met, violence will happen, and it’s mostly men committing it.

Young women who feel lonely and cast out from their surrounding society tend to suicide. The young men too, but sometimes the testosterone – that chemical that strengthens a man’s bond with animals – tempts them to take someone with them on the way out. Most women, being born nurturers, reject that option and just leave.

Cho took the option. Already a foreigner, his ideas about things – whatever they were – made him more alien. To reject his ideas was to reject him. This was intolerable, so to feel better he rejected everyone. He deemed others to be fools for not recognizing his value as a thinker. He got angry, which is an active way to be depressed – it feels better, and it gives one the energy to walk around instead of sleep, to walk around and try to fix the situation, to look for a solution. He did this for so long that he poisoned himself to the point where it became okay to kill people – the people he desperately needed – for not valuing him and his ideas.

Then he did just that.

People who have never been a lonely outcast don’t understand this. The good-looking journalists don’t, they just keep asking why. They’re not asking the people around them, the geeks, the obese, the ugly, the obsessed.