Seung-Hui Cho’s demented rampage on the Virginia Tech campus did more than just take the lives of thirty-two innocents. His gruesome actions, no doubt inspired by his fractured mind, not only caused families to fall to their knees in shock and immeasurable grief; they also brought out the shameless agenda mongers who jumped at the opportunity to spotlight their political causes or boost their media ratings.
At a time when our nation’s focus should have been, simply and compassionately on the families of Cho’s victims and the stunned survivors, some, like sharks to bloodied water, chose to focus the spotlight on themselves in the guise of showing support for the dead. In one such revolting display of such self-serving behavior, Nikki Giovanni, a University Distinguished Professor of English at Virginia Tech spouted off during the convocation.
“We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.”
Well, she got one thing right, no
one deserves a tragedy but if I were one of the parents who just lost a
child, I’d be fightin’ mad. It is important to
note that Giovanni is a political activist who, amongst other works,
writes poems that promote violence and racism. For
example, her poem “The True Import of Present Dialog, Black vs. Negro”
contains the following stanza asking black men if they can kill. “Can
you kill, Can you run a protestant down with your '68
Nikki Giovanni claims to speak out against violence and yet with her poetry she seems hell bent on inspiring it. It is one thing to have a sharp political tongue but quite another when your words clearly advocate bloodshed. It is ironic that this pro-elephant and anti-blond woman was at one point Cho’s professor at the University and had him removed from her classroom. Perhaps his frightful ramblings were upstaging her own. In any case, much like Cho with his overly aired videotaped rants, Giovanni’s speech at the convocation garnered her the attention from the media that she sought.
On the day of the shooting newscasters reported with somber voices and appropriately composed expressions. However, despite their efforts, they exuded ratings glee as they covered every minute detail of Cho’s movements. Reporters even spoke with Virginia Tech students on their cell phones, in-between the two shooting sessions, pumping them for information. Those students should have been hunkered down protecting their lives not peeking out the window for CNN or FOX news.
As the situation ripened, politicians quickly began to lobby for and against gun control. Others argued that atheists were not fairly represented at the convocation and many were quick to blame everything from violent video games to campus security for the deaths of the innocent. The fringe element blamed the decline of the masculine man (the guys weren’t manly enough to stop Cho) and the rise of feminism (the girls on campus were promiscuous and their rejection of Cho pushed him over the edge).
Some of these talking points, such as gun control and the excessive violence in games, music and movies are significant and may be relevant to the proliferation of campus shootings in recent years. Also relevant is the issue of the ludicrous political correctness that handicaps institutions from taking appropriate actions that might prevent these tragedies. To be fair, elephants, AIDS, and baby-killing runaway boulders are definitely topics to consider as well although it is still mystifying as to how they relate to Virginia Tech. Regardless, the convocation was a poor locale in which to air them.
The natural course of coping with explicit violence and critical loss is to try to find an explanation for what appears to be completely illogical and thus even more frightening than, for example, a robbery or a crime of passion where the motive is clear. However, to begin the blame game and the political grinding before the victim’s bodies, with their young hearts and minds so recently stilled, were not even cold is extraordinarily self-centered and frankly, despicable behavior.
