When Anger Turns Fatal: Our Collective Responsibility
You may remember this case. In 2007, the world was shaken by devastating news: Seung-Hui Cho, a 23-year-old South Korean E
nglish major, killed 32 people and then took his own life at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. It remains the deadliest shooting rampage by a single gunman in modern U.S. history.
As that tragedy reminded us, unchecked anger has the power to destroy families and drive human beings to commit unthinkable acts.
In the aftermath of killings like this one, enormous WHYs hammer our minds. Cho killed his fellow students without a word of warning. With chilling composure, he left campus after the first two killings, mailed his videos to a news network, and returned to continue the massacre. Do we really need to ask why?
What is our responsibility?
It is tempting to excuse ourselves from any share of responsibility by saying that Cho was mentally ill, that his classmates tormented him — perhaps without fully understanding the impact of their cruelty — or that the roots of his suffering lay in exposure to toxic chemicals from his family’s dry cleaning business. His sister said publicly that his family had never been able to envision that he was capable of so much violence.
But why not?
How is it possible that not one person perceived the magnitude of the rage Cho had been carrying — rage that ultimately exploded into a fatal episode? Perhaps we have learned to treat anger as an inevitable feature of human nature, an emotion that does not need to be understood or transformed. Many even justify it, offering us the image of a wrathful God or of a loving Jesus who was still capable of enough fury to drive merchants from the Temple.
And yet we know better. From this painful lesson, and from the many mass killings that have followed, we might learn that our society would be far better served if people came to understand God and Jesus — or whatever name we give to the sacred — as synonyms for joy, love, and compassion.
Why was Cho so alone that no one helped him work through his anger, calm his fears, or find his way out of his hatred? After the killings, it is impossible to say this was “none of our business.” We are not the same people we were before mass violence occurs. It is, inescapably, our business.
Compassion for the victims. But also for the perpetrator?
Beyond the profound compassion I feel for the families and friends of those lost in mass killings, I also carry, at the level of my soul, a deep compassion for people like Cho — those who appear to have lived tortured lives from which they found no exit. And I commit to advocating not only for a zero-tolerance-to-violence society, but for a zero-tolerance-to-indifference world.
A few weeks after events like these, the tragedy may fade from our daily conversations, but it is never truly forgotten. We may choose to forgive the perpetrators and question whether the tragedy could have been prevented. But nothing healing comes from hatred, and nothing changes from pointing fingers.
Our shared responsibility
If, from a spiritual standpoint, we are all one, what does that mean for us as a society? “We fell down with everyone in that classroom,” one blogger wrote in the days after Virginia Tech. Let the investigations about delayed warnings and institutional failures run their course. What matters equally is what we decide to do with the grief and discomfort these events awaken in us.
I comfort myself on such dark days with this: when violence strikes our hearts with terrible force, it can — extraordinarily enough — also crack them open. It can lead us to cherish life more fully, to reflect on how we might contribute to building a more compassionate society, and to ask how we can cultivate and teach the socioemotional skills that develop empathy — at home, in schools, and in our communities.
Let us take a moment each day to express our love to those mourning after these tragedies — including the families of the perpetrators. And then let us take another moment to reflect on our common responsibility. A world where we truly support one another is not a dream beyond reach. It is the world we choose to build, one relationship at a time.