First posted on my Yahoo 360 blog Friday April 20, 2007 - 04:53am (CDT)
Interesting what one finds, sometimes. I found this on a Technorati search under the terms "Virginia Tech". Profanity softened as per Yahoo's TOS.
Shane of Marietta, Georgia writes
"that cho a**hole
little fucking n** sends a bunch of pictures of himself trying to look like some kinda thug to nbc ... by the way...i can kinda understand why he would be interested in shooting himself after having to look at that mug in the mirror his whole life). ..."
not that there is anything racist about that at all. No, of course not. By the way, Shawn, "N**" has traditionally been a derogatory word for those of Japanese descent. The Virginia Tech shooter was Korean. Not that this is going to slow our racist friend down one bit as he baits the next kid whose family just made the mistake of moving into his hometown from Osaka or Taipei, I suppose. Good thing that this was an isolated incident, huh?
Oops, maybe not .... Cunning Linguist writes
"fucking g**k!"
Current mood: angry
it's been a while since i've written here, and usually i don't write about things which are serious. however i feel i should get something off my chest.
i was at a local grocery store buying some breakfast cereal (honeycomb, because it kicks a**.) when some caucasian guy decided that it would be appropriate to pick me out of a crowd and vent his rage at the virginia tech shooting at me.
"hey g**k! yeah you you slant eyed piece of s**t! i'm talking to YOU!"
naturally this got my attention, seeing as how i'm asian.
"excuse me? what did you just say?" i enquired.
"yeah you heard me g**k! i bet you're REAL happy that your friend in virginia murdered all those people!"
i remember distinctly feeling a sinking sensation in my stomach, like my guts were all being compacted into it.
"are you proud of how your g**k buddy slaughtered all those people? well? are you? ... he continued on his rantings as a crowd attracted by his screaming started to gather, i saw the faces of many. some sympathetic, some looking as if his hatred being directed towards me was deserved. ... "f**k you! the ONLY tragedy is that you goddamn g**ks weren't the ones that were killed! get on your f**king boat and go back to korea!" he screamed in my face, slapping my purchase out of my hand and kicking it away.
... it makes no sense, NONE. come on people, we're better than that. "
Not by much, to judge from from some of the quotes wal-loveless shares with us:
"Mauryce(11 hours ago)
Shhesh i say we should gather all the asian and mexicans and send them back on thier boats. Especially Koreans thier the most racists of all asians and viets too...freakin immigrants i tell u, LOOK how you scared our country. NO BODY LIKE's YOU G**KS NOW and you will feel the backlash around the country....
crhmaniac (10 hours ago)
f**k nigg**s, sp*cs, ghandis, ch**ks, g**ks, j*ps and any other person of color. your just as bad as a nigg*r you fagg*t. get with the times, we arent racist, were white pride. and for your f**king info we arent the minority anymore, maybe you should watch some news and see how many of us there are you f**king s**tbag n*gger b*tch. FTG - F**k The Ghetto
biggino2007 (1 day ago)
a FU##### g**k did this hope u route in hell
tintin166 (12 hours ago)
f**king korean !!!
damn them all to hell!!! f**king animals!! even in asia ,nobody like them
winrx (6 hours ago)
Korean guy was probably a paranoid schizophrenic and was never diagnosed as such - this is what happens when you don't take your pysch meds....!!!
Osmium14 (13 hours ago)
The sl*pe walks into a dorm, sees his race-mixing Jewess girlfriend with a n*gger, shoots them both and then goes on to shoot 30 other people dead (hopefully, mostly more non-whites like that peruvian b*aner that died), and then shoots himself dead. Perfect story with a perfect ending.
jazzandpunk (14 hours ago)
Watch out for korean!!!
Most korean naturally have psychoneurosis.
Their genes held heavy hysteria.
crhmaniac (10 hours ago)
b*tch asians will NEVER f*cking take over the world you small d*cked rice cooking ch*nk piece of shit. WHITE people run America and the world get used to it f*ggot. all ch*nks, g**ks and j*ps are good for is working in factories for 10 cents a day qu**r. and as for your honda, it sounds like a 4 speed blender you wide eyed fucking c*ck s*cker.
SatanicSlaughter616 (14 hours ago)
F*CKING ASIANS.
masabsn (14 hours ago)
You f**king Korean....All of the Koreans don't care about others. They just care about their moneys. Even they can't speak English after living this country for 18-30 years. They always hire illegal immigrants and use them as a slave. Now they start shooting Americans. I am angry about this.
Derekdraken (16 hours ago)
Also in the U.S. Forces base in South Korea,
Koreans have caused the rape trouble to an American woman.
Koreans are sick."
How very lovely. Is that all? Please, we haven't even started. Let's take a look at what Bino Rino had to say
"You can blame bullying, harassment, drugs, alcohol, narcissism or anything else but it all comes down to one kid with one choice to make. The little f**king g**k that shot up Virginia tech can go s*ck a fat c**k."
So far, all comments on that individual's post have been positive. What has been truly sickening has been just how easy this kind of commentary has been to find and guess what? The people who get targeted for it, sooner or later, get tired of it. Without disputing what would seem to be obvious (that Cho came completely unhinged) - do you think that he might have had a little help going as insane as he was in the end? I might also say something about the way in the very suggestion that there be any sort of limitation on immigration or that the distinctiveness of Western cultures ought to be preserved would be responded to with hysterical outbursts of politically correct rage and calls for censorship and blacklisting in one decade, yet garbage like this is considered acceptable in the next. But then, were Cho an African-American instead of a Korean immigrant, would the casual racial generalizations be accepted even today?
Probably not, judging from what just happened to Imus. Even the faintest hint that one has engaged in that kind of racism, no matter how unjustified by the facts, still brings on howls of outrage, so why the double standard? Here's a thought - how about because the old racism never went away, it just went underground, and when you take a look at the minorities whose bashing is currently politically correct, like, say, Middle Easterners, as we saw in an ePlaya post that I made an earlier reference to on my homelist, a pattern most definitely begins to emerge. Looking at the frequently and openly maligned Jews, and South and East Asians among others, one finds visibly non-Anglo-Saxon peoples who've often had the bad taste to outachieve their fairer skinned so-called "betters", held onto their traditions and managed to live well, even during those all too frequent times when courtesy of real discrimination, they've had to learn to live with less. They have, in short, not minded their places at all, and some of our "progressive" friends aren't prepared to accept that. They look at some of those coming out of places like Englewood, broken in body and spirit or addicted to playing the fool, in either case not looking like prospective competitors who might get in the way of the ambitions of those who wish to advance without having to work or learn anything, and ask so many others "why can't you be more like them".
Perhaps because some of us remember that dignity comes from within, and that the true disgrace that comes from abuse lies on the abuser, not on the abused. I didn't know Mr.Cho, and under the circumstances feel fortunate in this regard, so I don't really know how much of this applies to his case, but can't help but wonder when I see some of the comments about his case.
If anybody is pushed hard enough and long enough, he will push back. Everybody has a breaking point, and it is the shame of a supposedly civilised society that so many of its supposedly civilised members will work so hard to find that point, and then posture as victims when they find it, but - take a look at what follows. Looking at the body count and taking the short time available to a shooter before the police arrive should be enough to squash any theory that the shooter in such a case is giving his targets their just desserts or anything like them, that the people he is taking out are his tormenters. We heard that suggestion after Columbine and now we're hearing it again, and to give that one a reality check - every try finding somebody on a college campus who wasn't hiding from you? Know that "needle in a haystack" feeling as you try to find a lab partner or a friend? What are the odds that Cho would have been able to track down a few dozen of those who mistreated him in rapid succession?
Answer: Approximately nil. The tormented shooter in such a case does not dispense social justice, he cuts down innocent people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time; heroic innocent people, as in the case of that professor who died holding the door shut while he helped his students to escape. The actual tormenters in such a case will most likely be off shopping for toilet paper or something at the time, and survive to give gripping firsthand accounts of ordeals they weren't present for themselves, and in all of the confusion, we'll probably never know who they were, especially given the reality that so many of the prospective witnesses are hostile that their testimony would have to be regarded as being tainted by any reasonable person. In his reaping of the innocent, Cho ensured that justice was the one thing that would never be seen and, of course, he ended up dead - a lose-lose proposition for all but those who deserved to lose, assuming that there were any of those and that we're not just hearing stories created after the fact by those who want to be sensitive. A few decades into the Political Correctness era, with respect for the truth on college campuses at a historic low, one can't reasonably discount that as a possibility.
But let's say that it's true. Cho is dead and gone and has taken his victims with him, and we can't fix that, but we can intervene in cases in which somebody seems to be starting down the road he took off a cliff, and we can do it with greater wisdom than that seen in such quasi-fascistic suggestions that he should have been involuntarily committed because some women found him vaguely creepy or that some instructor got nasty vibes from his writing. (Not that I wouldn't understand why, if the contents of this page are an accurate copy of the script of Cho's play "Richard McBeef"; please read it for yourself and see what you think). That sort of thing is the death of civil liberty and will, ironically, generate much of the very kind of explosive rage that it is offered as a defense against. One intervenes, when one sees somebody else being mistreated, by making it one's business and letting him know that he's not going to be left to fend for himself. "You mean, intervene when a member of an oppressed group is mistreated because of his race or his ..." No. Anybody who is being ganged up on and bullied because of something that in no way negatively reflects on his character is being oppressed and to worry about whether his oppression counts or not, whether the group he is being used as an icon for has seen enough hatred yet for it to qualify as an oppressed group, is to say "let's wait for the explosion and then do something about it". Waiting until there are dead bodies before acting to avert a firefight is not a very conscientious choice or a very prudent one, yet it is one we can count on seeing many people make.
And when we can't get the creeps to behave? Maybe some of the Asian kids at some of these schools ought to go hang out with some of the Jewish kids and compare notes. While I don't know whether or not what I've heard about the treatment seen by Cho was true, let's say that looking back on the experience of being Jewish and noticably non-Anglo-Saxon in appearance in a more rednecked location, I find a lot of what is being described very, very familiar, and if we all acted on every urge we felt, that the herd would be very seriously thinned out at this point. So why didn't we and don't we? Maybe because when the day got to be too much for some of us, we would turn to others for support and could count on getting a needed reminder that the whole world had not, in fact, actually gone insane. I can't help but wonder if Cho ever got that needed reminder, and if in an era in which all complaints of injustice by those not officially recognized as being among the oppressed are dismissed as whining in a fashionably "in your face" manner, if maybe any sign that he needed it was responded to, perversely, with more abuse. By the time he got to Virginia Tech, trying to be the person who gave it to him might have been unwise, but getting to the bad place he ended in is something that didn't happen overnight, and what if there had been somebody there for him before he got to that point? Say, maybe when he was a mildly unhappy middle school student instead of a borderline suicidal undergrad?
But that's the problem, isn't it? Consider the pop wisdom that gets in the way of answering a sensible question - "other people have it worse than you". If physiological health issues were addressed in the same way that so many would have mental health issues dealt with, nobody would ever emerge from a hospital alive, because nobody would be let in until he was already terminal. The folk wisdom on this point is folk idiocy; one does not wait until somebody has been pushed to the edge before speaking up for him or being there for him. To say "others have it worse than you" is to say "what, this is all we get to do to you" and then wonder why an overtly hostile response follows to one's barely covert aggression. One doesn't wait until the one put upon has it worse than everybody else before seeing the need for him to see some support and some justice, because nobody should have it that bad or come close to having it that bad.
If one should insist on feeling otherwise, that is perhaps one's privilege, but then again it is equally well the privilege of the rest of us to not care very much if one should get to snack on a little lead before settling in for a good, long sleep. While I wouldn't go so far as to say that law enforcement should look the other way as violence is inflicted on our more callous neighbors, I will go so far as to say that there are some people who really aren't worth mourning, and that some of them exit this world with clean criminal records and undeservedly good personal reputations. (Note: My thanks to the writers at the Fairbank Report for linking to that script).
Added, April 24,25: Found a link to Cho's other play, Mr.Brownstone.
Note inserted October 22 - the one and only copy that I could find of that play, which every single other source made reference to, has been taken down, and the Internet Archive only had time to archive the cover page of the script: 1. I looked and looked and found nothing, except maybe a fresh reason to look down on CNN - really, guys, you couldn't afford to keep your own copy of a piece of news story documentation? Diskspace costs what - 1/4 of a cent per Meg, but you have to mooch off of some blogger at AOL instead of handling your own file storage?
If I find out about another copy, I'll insert the appropriate link or links in an appendix below, but I'm not optimistic.
More of the same sludge; "Richard McBeef" looks less like an isolated outburst and more like what somebody was in class to create. I'm not at all surprised that his instructors would want to show him the door, under the circumstances. The Fairbanks report has posted some excerpts from a New York Times article about Cho that creates a picture of an individual that almost any sensible person would view with concern, raising the question of what somebody could possibly be thinking about as he went out seeking the attention of this troubled individual by baiting him. Did some of these people not understand the concept of being silent and letting trouble drift past one?
