I wasn't nervous about going to the CU Boulder campus for class today, but I was certainly a bit more on guard after more than thirty people were murdered at Virginia Tech yesterday. Horrible acts often beget more horrible acts. Last September, 16-year-old Emily Keyes was killed at Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colo., and days later, a madman killed five people at an Amish school in Pennsylvania.
Knowledge of the tragedy in Virginia added a layer of unease to an already tense day on the Boulder campus. The fanatical anti-abortion folks were out with their mural-sized pictures of bloody and dismembered fetuses in various stages of development. Then there was the student Republican club holding its annual "Affirmative Action Bakesale," which drew a crowd of about 100, sign-wielding counter protesters. The "Bakesale" featured a single, lonely bin of grocery store cookies, which were on sale for different prices depending on the buyers race. The idea is to protest the racial preference practices of affirmative action.
Too add to all this dramatic tension in the crisp air this morning, our professor was pulled from class suddenly because a student in one of her other classes had expressed admiration for the shooter in Blacksburg, Va., and added that he had fantasized about doing something similar. The professor called the police and spent the remainder of our class calling student witnesses and giving a police report. NPR reported that several other universities around the country had similar scares.
What happened yesterday is incomprehensible, even for a society as plagued by gun violence as this one. It's being called the worst shooting in modern U.S. history, and the blogosphere is exploding with posts about the event. The right-wingers say it's proof we need to relax our gun laws; after all, if other students had been armed, the shooter never would have been so "successful" in his rampage. Those on the left say the incident screams for tighter gun regulation, or at least a ban on assault weapons and automatic handguns.
What I don't want to see, but what I fear is inevitable, is an anti-Asian backlash in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre. The shooter was a 23-year-old student, originally from South Korea named Seung-Hui Cho. He lived in a dorm; his roommates described him as a stoic, silent loner. Apparently, one of his English professors once tried to warn school officials about his frighteningly dark paper topics, but there wasn't much anyone could do unless he made a threat, they said.
No race or nationality has a monopoly on hate and brutality. The killer's race is pretty insignificant; what's more important is what we can do to make sure this never happens again. But surely, just as Muslim-Americans felt targeted in the wake of Sept. 11 attacks, so will Asian-Americans likely feel scrutinized and blamed for the horrific act of one sick individual.
