things that make me think

Hey, everyone else is piling on the Virginia Tech story, so I guess if I wanna be cool then I have to join 'em. But this is insane on so many fronts. The scenario itself was a tad bit surprising, but the totally overblown and emotionalized (I think I just created a word) news coverage wasn't. I'm sure the Iraq and Hillary vs. Barack stories were starting to run out of marketability, and the media has proven it will stop at no boundaries to hawk its crap to a public that can't wait to lap it up. And along comes a school shooting, complete with gore, side plots, traumatized kids, fear angles to play up, openings to spin up controversy where none exists, and on and on. The media apes must be throwing one heck of a party right now. Freakin' pathetic. So allow me to be a total hypocrite by tossing my two cents in.

The first thing that occurs to me here is, that shooter was a machine. Folks have been known to flip out and go berserk, but not this guy. Anybody who can stay collected enough to get in a raging argument with a girlfriend, storm out only to come back and kill her a few minutes later, and sit down and pen a long goodbye-world note has nerves of steel. And not only that, the guy then managed to stay calm and "normal" enough to march across campus armed to the teeth and not arouse much of any suspicion, then carry out one of the more methodical bloodbaths in recent history for several minutes without showing any emotion or letting the circumstances of the situation move him at all. That's just nuts.

That tells me the guy had been so depressed for so long that he was basically numb to the world. I don't think he was a psychopath with a serial killer mindset but rather that he had given up on life so much that he had no ability to care about anything and was basically just trying to be heard and cared about for once. Any person can only take so much pain before they crack. I actually feel really sorry for the guy. Not that I think he was in any way justified, it's just that his actions revealed a lot about his life story. He put up with a lot more pain for a much longer time than any of the victims of his rampage. Of course they didn't deserve to die, but in a sense he didn't deserve the crappy hand he was dealt in life either. It's amazing he managed to hold himself together for long enough to pass himself off as only slightly abnormal for so many years, because I'm sure his outburst had been building for a long, long time -- as in, his entire life probably.

There's more to write here, but I'd have to choose my words so carefully it'd take forever. And I just don't feel like going there anyway. So I'm gonna hold off on that for now. Plus, it's getting late and I still have stuff to do. Working 12-hour days this week doesn't leave me with much time to work with, although I find that it seems weirdly more enjoyable than working regular days and being too exhausted at home to do much else anyway. And it could be training for a future job that requires such craziness. Or so I hope, at this point in my career and life. And if lightning strikes five times in the same place between now and Saturday then I'll have been putting in hours toward a Peru trip. Nah, I'm not holding my breath either.