Virginia Tech Massacre

16 April 2007, this would be a devastating memory for human history, and its implications would take years to dissolve. Meanwhile, debates will continue, discussing why he killed 33 hopeful lives, including his own.

Despite the heated arguments on his actions deeming what he did as either forgivable or unpardonable, people do not realize the hurts of the victim's families and friends. Let's face it. We may know the name and face of the killer, but of the 32 victims, how many do we know exactly?

These 32 lives are each, a budding flame of hope. Many have great aspirations, and inspiring lives. For one, there is Liviu Librescu, who endured through the Holocaust as a teenager, and during Monday's shooting, he used his own body to block the door, buying time for students to flee. This heroic act is commendable, but the family members must have felt desolated.

Human are essentially selfish creatures, when trouble boils, few are willing to sacrifice themselves for others. However, those who do so, often do it on the expense of the family members. Although seen as hero in the eyes of those saved, he would more or less be blamed and called selfish or dumb by the family. It may seem ironic to call a selfless hero selfish, but that is often the case. Being selfless, they gave up their lives for the victims, but have they spared a thought about their family, which needs them? Not all family members are able to understand, and some of them do not forgive the people that the hero did help.

As outsiders, we may see it clearly, the hero puts others' need before self, and thinks that the family will feel proud of him, and will understand. However, some do not, and end up hating the hero, and those that he saved, might feel guilty as they indirectly caused his death. Ultimately the issue of whether heroes should sacrifice their lives is another big controversy on its own.

Indeed, many would argue that the killer, Cho Seung-Hui is selfish and that he should not have blamed the world, just for a few bad experiences. If we look back, we can recognize that he has actually left obvious leads to his plots. For one, he displays odd character and writes violent scripts. This alone stands as concrete evidence to his instability of his mind.
Somehow, some people around him did realized and try to help, but they did not follow up with the case, and ended up in despair instead. His cold attitude towards other led to a worsening of situation.

To me, it really is a vicious cycle. People are afraid of him, find him weird, and go all out to avoid him. Apparently, he feels that people around him did not care enough as despite his efforts to attract attention, he fails to get it. Overtime, this hard truth hit him, and he built up a mindset that people are generally insincere and fake. The more he feels that people do not care the more he tries to act in a promiscuous way. To his dismay however, this resulted in more people shunning him.

No matter what is said now, it will not alter the fact that 33 lives have been destroyed and that there is nothing we can do to revive them. What we can try to help is that, we can identify people with similar characteristics as him, make friends with them with a sincere heart. All we can do is share our love with them, and hopefully, they will learn that the world is not the evil after all. With these preventive measures done to reduce the number of depressed people around, we might be able to control and anticipate the school violence.

Even though we should befriend those who seem lonely, it is not right to just plainly be their friend. What they actually need, is a listening ear, a reliable friend with a pair of willing listening ear. If everyone in the society plays their part by making friends with a person with not much friends, we will be able to reach out to a lot of people. This, my friend, might be all it takes to avoid more lives lost.