Vic Socotra

18 April 2007

Hero

Liviu Librescu

I got through shock and made it to anger yesterday, which is a lot further than the families will get. It will take months for the process to deliver something like peace for them, if ever. They say that the passage from anger and denial to acceptance is necessary for healing.

I imagine that is true, though I will not let the anger go for a while.

The faces began to appear late in the day. The four girls from around here were pretty, high-achieving people with bright futures. The media did not show us many of the others, but I assume they are about the same.

We have covered so much ground since yesterday morning. Now we know who did it, and we have an inkling of some of the demons that were after him. It is painfully familiar, this profile of the lone gunman.

I have lived in the Republic of Korea, and traveled to the other Korea in the North. I have no shred of resentment to a solid, hard-working people. So let us let them grieve at the shame that has been brought on their community and concentrate for the moment on the aggressor, who has far more in common with the other monsters who flit briefly into the bright light of infamy with their acts of horror.

Cho was a resident alien, coming here at age eight- so he is mostly our problem, not Koreas. He was able to purchase the Glock and the Walther handguns legally. No previous record of offenses, though he creeped-out the people with whom he interacted.

He was from Centreville, site of a famous and bloody conflict in the Civil War, but now an anonymous warren of town homes and isolation. No longer country, it is not city, either, and the battlefield has been long paved over. It is soulless and spiritless and requires access to an automobile car to go anywhere.

Centreville is where we are pushing the other immigrants from the neighborhoods around Big Pink as we tidy up Arlington County.

I can imagine Cho sitting in a small bedroom, feeling bullied by hard-working shopkeeper parents, working impossible hours, the isolation deadening connections to a country that he has not accepted, surrounded by engaged and active kids.

He was referred to counseling for the strangeness of his writings, though hindsight in tragedy is always infallible. He certainly was cunning and smart enough to carry chains and locks in his backpacks, orchestrate a couple bomb plots, and plan his crime with cold anger. They say he laughed as he walked, before he turned one of the guns on himself.

The cops apparently did not alert campus to the threat after the first two killings because they thought they had a suspect, the boyfriend of the first woman to die. He was reported to have guns at his house, which is not uncommon in southwest Virginia. The police incorrectly connected those dots, and two hours went by as people went on with their normal routines.

There is also at least one hero amongst the sheep. Liviu Librescu was an engineering professor, and he was teaching that morning. He had been born in Romania, in the time of the horrors there, and survived a Nazi death camp on the way to his encounter with Mr. Cho. He apparently was not of a mind to take any crap off anyone, including a heavily-armed kid with dead eyes.

They say that Cho shot him dead while Liviu stood in the doorway, blocking entry to his classroom. The delay gave some of his students time to jump out the windows to safety.

I don't know why an old man walked toward danger while others huddled passively, awaiting their fate. Perhaps it is also a product of the life he lived and the places he lived it.

There will be calls today for more rigid gun laws, and enhanced campus security and better ways to pass public alerts. I think there may be an argument for a public prepared to respond that is counter-intuitive to the natural reaction to call for unilateral disarmament. I don't know if you have noticed it, but there is a passivity that is inculcated in us today that I find disturbing. We are taught a certain docility in the way we don our public personas.

It is probably time to think about how we are taught to respond to crisis and skip the moment of paralysis just as Mr. Librescu did.

I need to think about that when I cool off. I am still seething at the injustice perpetrated on those young lives. It will take a while to internalize the sadness.

One thing I do not want to do is get to acceptance.