Empathy, Tragedy, Senselessness

I think the Virginia Tech tragedy, as its now playing out, continues to prove that most Americans don't have a grasp on their emotionally distressed sides. Its far easier for us to look for a quick, simple answer, than to explore the idea of lapses in our mental health system or society. We want the pat, Hollywood answer - where the crazed killer is jilted by a girlfriend and goes on a rampage, or where he was crazy all along. See, he wrote violent stories - it was bound to happen sooner or later. Its far easier to look for a simple answer, but it leaves us with questions. How could we have not seen this coming since it was so obvious that he was crazy?

The answer is not simple, and it never will be. Each of us is capable of a Virginia Tech type tragedy and that's the scary fact. We are all awash in a sea of chemicals and neurosynapses that could simply freak out on us when we least expect it. A common stuffy head can cause undue pressure on certain portions of our brains causing us to see things or hear things that aren't there. Does this make us pick up a gun and kill 30 people? No. Of course not. But what I'm trying to say is, mental health is not always a constant and we should never take it for granted.

I knew a guy, Jerry, about four years ago. He was a roommate of a friend of mine. He was affable, loyal, and a good guy to know. We took him hiking with us. We hung out with him. My brother was even considering moving into an apartment with him. All of a sudden, Jerry disappeared. Nobody knew what had happened to him. We assumed that he'd probably gone home suddenly to visit his family until four days later, we got a call from his worried family that he hadn't been in touch with them. Though my friend filed a missing person's report, the paperwork was too slow. In the meantime, after an arrest and a referral to a mental health evaluator, Jerry was put back on the streets by the police department where, less than 24 hours later, he tried to beat a pregnant woman to death with a paint can.

None of us had known that Jerry was bipolar until the incident occurred. The police that had arrested him and let him go did not know that he was violent or potentially dangerous, or they obviously would not have released him. Less than an hour before he'd committed the terrible crime, Jerry had been wandering the streets asking strangers to help him. Clearly out of his mind, most strangers walked away from him.

It was hard for me to grasp that a guy I knew had snapped like that - that I had spent time with him, hiked with him, and hung out with him. He had been a normal guy one day, and turned out to be a homicidal maniac the next. It was senseless, tragic, and I empathized with both the victim (both mother and child lived, thank God!) and the attacker. I'm sure that people who did not know him assumed that he was evil and looked for obvious explanations (he must have been on drugs, or he played too many video games, or he was a racist sociopath). But the "simple" fact of the matter was, he'd forgotten to take his meds and one thing had led to another in a terrible spiraling of events.

The media wants you to believe that this guy's writing was a clear indication that he was sick and depraved and was a serial killer waiting to happen. Don't you believe it. Don't you take the simple explanation. Writing is a form of therapy for the writer, sure - we've all written stories about harming people who have harmed us. I've killed off my ex-girlfriend hundreds of times with falling blimps, vicious attacks by wild animals, etc... But the fact is, writing is make believe. Its not real. Its a release - not much different than group therapy. A writer will write some pretty sick things, but that doesn't make him a killer waiting to happen - just ask Robert Bloch, who wrote, amongst other things, Psycho.

The real tragedy of Virginia Tech will occur if, once again, we look for and then swallow the simple explanation. Evil, drugs, insanity - these are all too simple to explain such terrible actions. Let us look, instead, to a more complex understanding of the events that happened that day and try to imagine what might have been going through that poor killer's head that could cause him to want to kill so many innocent people. For it is only in understanding that we will ever be able to prevent such actions from happening again.