Day 3: Open Forum for Morons

Ok, overall the media coverage concerning the tragedy at Virginia Tech has been excellent, at least on CNN, I've been avoiding much of my usual trolling of news stations because in this case I don't feel up to dealing with wingnuttery of any flavor and CNN is about the safest of the bunch in that department. I have to give them credit, for the most part (so far) they've picked intelligent and knowledgeable commentators and not given much air time to the nutwing factions.

Thumbs down to MSNBC unfortunately. I watched Chris Matthews cut off a guest who actually knew what she was talking about so he could go to a clip of the roommates. Sorry, I'm sure they are traumatized by this but they weren't the brightest bulbs in the pack about this and they have nothing informative to add to the discussion. Had to change the channel, twenty-something young men with nary a clue about human behavior I might feel empathy for...I'm not interested in listening to them ad infinitum.

Scarborough Country featured the Rev. Franklin Graham, my personal pick for moron of the week.

This is what we have to understand. There is—there is evil in this world. There is a devil who‘s called the god of this age, who wants to seek and destroy your life and my life and every life.

Yes, of course, let's blame it all on some imaginary devil who is out to get us if we don't walk the prescribed Christian path. It absolves us of all personal responsibility and we can turn a blind eye to our culture of violence and other annoying issues like how we fail to care for the sick and frail among us. Instead of working to develop a more effective mental health delivery system we can just call in the occasional exorcist and pat ourselves on the back for being good Christians. Ignore brain dysfunction and hope it will go away. Good luck with that.

Then the one that really got me going, Steve Capus, president of NBC news. I'm not going to pound Capus too hard, he only said what most people think but it 's at the heart of our problem. Referring to his decision to air some of the video sent in by Cho Seung-Hui he said it was "the closest we could get to seeing inside the mind of a killer".

Wrong. The closest you can get to seeing inside the "mind of a killer" is inside your own head. We are all natural born killers. Trying to separate people like Cho from the rest of the pack is the biggest mistake we can make.

Every single one of us is fully capable of behaving exactly like this guy did. A few misfiring neurotransmitters is about all that differentiated him from the rest of us and sent him down the path he took. He was not "demon-possessed" nor was he some unique sub-type of human being, he was 99.9% just like the rest of us.

We have all these myths about mental illness that it's high time we exploded. Mental illness is not glamorous, exciting or exotic. It's mind-numbingly dull and entirely too common. It's living in a perpetual state of fear, superstition and distortion for those who suffer from it. Picture seeing reality through a mental shield of carnival funhouse mirrors or walking around with Anne Coulter in your head talking 24/7 and you get some idea. Do you really think most of us would react much better given those circumstances?

Cho wasn't a freak. He suffered from a disorder that is all too common and he'd probably been suffering since his early teens, possibly even childhood. Life in a neverending state of fear and paranoia that led to isolation and then hatred for everyone and everything outside of himself. The only thing that was freakish about the entire tragedy is that none of we supposedly "normal" functioning human beings ever did anything about it. Apparently we hoped if we ignored him he'd just go away. Now who's crazy?

If the measure of "sanity" is dealing with reality then maybe it's time we dealt with the reality that people who do things like this are not so terribly different from the rest of us and if you're of a religious frame of mind you might do well to remember that "there but for the grace of God go I".