An Alternate Witness

This morning I and other residents received an email from the campus Apartment Housing Office with "Virginia Tech" in the subject line, and a message to the effect that this is a multicultural community and we should be careful not to make generalizations about large groups of students based on the actions of a few. I was amazed that anyone would have generalized from one clearly deranged student's actions to the entire Korean and Korean-American community.

I hoped that I would see a frequent client at the writing center, a South Korean chaplain studying counseling, but when I found myself coming to an early finish with an East Asian international student writing about Korea, I took the opportunity to ask him if he knew of any incidents against East Asian students on campus. While he concluded that he believed the university's Korean community was overly anxious, he mentioned a few accidents that left me feeling uneasy. He said he had heard that all the Korean students have left Blacksburg, VA, that two of our city's four Korean churches have canceled outdoor services scheduled for this coming Sunday, and that his pastor had told him about incidents of high school students ganging up to beat on Korean classmates. He also said he had heard that the South Korean diplomatic mission to Washington, DC, had wanted to attend and perhaps say a few words of sympathy at the convocation at Virginia Tech in which Pres. Bush spoke, but that the US State Department told them that, as the shooter was a Permanent Resident, i.e. an immigrant to the US, South Korea had no reason to get involved.

I'm disappointed in my fellow Americans. After September 11th, in which al-Qaeda overtly claimed to be attacking American society, I expected some backlash against Arabs and Muslims, though I still thought it would be small-minded to blame an entire ethnic or religious group for the acts of the extremist few. But it didn't even cross my mind that anyone would blame Koreans and Korean Americans generally for the acts of this single student, who was clearly disturbed and acting from personal motives.

But then this student I was tutoring said that Koreans, both here and in South Korea, were expressing feelings of guilt that one of their own could do such a terrible thing. This, he thought, was unnecessary, but I was reminded that I was in Switzerland eight years ago this week when the Columbine shooting happened, and I felt the same impulse to apologize and explain that this was not the American way.

Even still, the biggest tragedy of Virginia Tech, the airplane crash that killed a Yankees ball player last fall, and countless other such incidents, is the way we as a nation respond. It is sad to me to see that our first reaction in a tragedy has become this: "Police say that they are not yet ruling out terrorism." As if that were the primary motive for violence in this world.

I was a college Senior in Political Science 101 on the first anniversary of September 11th. The professor wanted to spend that day's class remembering the tragedy of a year before; knowing that almost half the students in the class had been high school Seniors in New York City a year earlier, I was dreading the class. I was wrong to do so. I was surprised at how clear-headed and eloquent my classmates were. In particular, I remember the words of a girl from Oregon. Her mother woke her that morning with the news, and she said her first thought was that she didn't have time to mourn, because someone was going to have to make sure that our civil liberties would not be stolen away as the nation reacted.

When I heard what had happened at Virginia Tech, I thought of the girl from Oregon, and I thought, I can't mourn because someone has to remember the dead, beseiged and violated elsewhere.

Don't get me wrong, this is a tragedy, as unprecedented a tragedy in its own way as September 11th. My junior high was the site of a school shooting, and my sympathy goes out to the students of Virginia Tech and the people of Centerville, VA, home town of the shooter and several of his victims (and some friends of mine).

But let us not neglect to notice that today--two days later--was an extraordinarily bloody day in Iraq. More than a hundred were killed and over twice that many injured. It is absolutely right for Pres. Bush to pray at Virginia Tech, and for universities and schools all across the country to re-examine their emergency procedures and the measures they take to monitor the mental health of their students. However, we must be careful that such actions are not taken at the expense of the attention Iraq, Darfur, Nigeria, Russia and other troublespots also deserve, even require.