He beat them all in chess, but he lost in the end.

Caution, this is a long and serious blog.

I know that the Virginia Tech massacre happened a while ago, but there was something that I wanted to write about it, but I never got the chance to, until I started to think about it again today. Whenever these things happen, there is always shock and there is always grief about the victims and rage against the killer. It’s natural to feel sorry for victims, but what about the killer, should we be sorry for him, or hate him? I don’t know. Back when the pictures of the killer came out on the news, I remember seeing those pictures of him holding a gun to his head or pointing a gun or a knife, and I remember that the emotions that came to me were not rage, anger or hate. I felt sad. Looking at his face in the photos I saw hate and anger, but I also saw pain and suffering. I felt sorry for this man as I tried to imagine what could have caused this fellow human to become inhuman. I am not saying that I feel empathy towards him, I am not saying that there is anything that can excuse what he done, what he did was terrible. However, I believe we should not just concentrate on blaming him, or his parents, or whatever, we need to look around.

Something that bothered me during this time was how the media was glorifying what he did. “Greatest shooting in US history… biggest loss of life since…etc” was all over the news. You know, this guy probably murdered all those innocent people, because nobody ever gave him the attention that he craved, and doing this heinous deed he believed would grant him the attention he so desired or give him some kind of significance that he believed he lacked. Well, looks like he got what he wanted, thanks to the media, he was on every channel and was discussed and “analyzed” for days. This country will keep having their “Columbines” and “Virginia tech massacres” as long as people think they can get attention by committing these acts, and the media is proving them right.

This also reminded me of someone I knew in high school. His name was Joel and he was a real asshole, a typical delinquent, a bully if you will. Joel was pretty intelligent also, although he never worked hard in school, and missed most days of it. One time Joel and I were involved in a fist fight, but I still never hated him, I felt bad for him because I knew he had problems. One time I went to play chess at the chess club meeting (yes that does sound like a nerd thing to do) and I was losing to this huge nerd, when Joel showed up and started to give every nerd a hard time before he stopped by my table and started to help me, telling me which moves to make, in the end, with Joel’s help I ended up beating the nerd. After that, Joel played a game with everyone else and he beat all of them, then he left, he never came back to play chess again. Next year one day after the Columbine massacre, someone called in a bomb threat to our school. Later I would learn it was Joel, he was expelled from school and as far as I know, he was sent to military school (yeah because that’s would you do to troubled youths who call in bomb threats, right). I never saw Joel again.

Later on in my second year of college I heard from my high school friends that Joel was dead. He came back to Lincoln after military school and lived on the streets, involved in various gangs, one day he was murdered, shot in the chest. This news made me sad, because even though he was an asshole, even though he probably had a conduct disorder, for some reason I know that deep down, he was a good person. Rest in peace Joel. I guess the point of this blog is that I believe some people are born bad and some people become bad, those that become bad, they were once good, and can be good again, if only we give then a chance. Unfortunately most of them don’t get the chance, and then they either die or commit something atrocious.