Cho Seung-Hui: “Loner” label doesn’t bring solace.

“Cho was a loner and authorities are having a hard time finding information about him”

(Read the rest of the article here)

I’ve been checking CNN.com as much as possible these last couple of days, reading updates about VTech, wanting, like everyone else, answers. I want to know why. Who. Who does this sort of thing and why?

As of 2:00 pm this afternoon, nobody really knows. Authorities have his name, but that’s about it. They have his name and they know he was “a loner”.

I’m tired of that word. I’m sick and tired of hearing it attached to these boys who walk into their schools and shoot innocent people. When we’re grasping for reasons, grasping for solutions, this is word we keep slapping on the front page of every media outlet going to print. He was a loner. As if that explains everything.

It doesn’t. It never has. Not to me.

What does the word loner even mean? These killers had no friends? These killers never talked to anyone around them? They ate alone? They had no roommates? They never raised their hands in class? They didn’t interact with their families? They had social issues that everyone could feel? They dressed strange? All of the above??

We can’t possibly hold ourselves accountable for fixing our classmates problems, but how can one person be so mentally and socially isolated that they have the capacity to walk into classrooms and systematically murder everyone around them?

Virginia Tech, like Columbine 8 years earlier (to almost the day. Columbine occurred on April 20th, 1999) is a horrible, heartbreaking tragedy. But there’s another tragedy underneath these two killings. The tragic isolation of these so-called loners. We, as a peer group, as a nation, need to spend more time looking into this disturbing phenomenon. Students have been bullied, isolated, lonely, since the beginning of formalized education, why is it having such devastating effects now? What is different in the 21st century that is allowing anger, depression, loneliness, and mental anguish to erupt into cruel, full scale violence?

Instead of throwing around overused, vague labels, we need to ask these questions, and not stop asking, until something is figured out.