By Misty Nuckolls - Lawrence.com

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Here is my input on media coverage of depression following the VT massacre. As usual, it degenerated into name-calling. My bad.

Oh, boo fucking hoo.

He was so depressed. No one saw the warning signs. No one stepped in to put him in a nice garden with nice young men in clean white coats.

He cried out through his poetry and his crap-ass plays. He was so lonely, and so depressed.

Depressed, depressed, depressed. It’s all over the coverage.

It’s bullshit.

Sure, the kid probably suffered from clinical depression. So do millions of other people who never chain shut a school building and start slaughtering. Including yours truly.

Oh, not that I’ve never wanted to. Such fantasies consumed a great deal of my class time in high school. The same can be said for an assload of adolescents at some point or another.

But unless you’re a soulless psychopathic freak, you grow the fuck out of it.

I just finished reading a newsletter article intended for journalists, about giving out accurate and non-sensational information about depression in the wake of Cho Sueng Hack-Rambo-Wannabe’s Last Stand. It was good information, but it missed the point entirely.

What this moron did, he did not because of clinical depression, but because he had no morals, had never matured past the age of 8, had no concept of true ambition or personal accountability, and had fatally wrapped himself up in the epic tale of Cho Sueng Hui Martyrs Himself But Really Just Gets Back At “Those” Bastards And Becomes A Legend.

Watching the video he sent to CBS or wherever, it’s pretty clear that this was not a person suffering from true paranoid schizophrenia. He was suffering from a traumatic lack of maturity.

He didn’t look like a depressive to me. He looked like he was having a grand ol’ time masturbating his narcissism.

I happen to agree with his poetry teacher, who dismisses the idea that the poor kid was just a tortured soul begging for intervention by saying, “He was just mean.”

Amen, lady. He wasn’t a frustrated artist screaming out to be heard. He shunned every attempt made to befriend or aid him. In his head, he was some avenging cyberpunk ninja, and he wasn’t about to let anyone’s kindness or concern interfere with that. In his head, he was just too fucking cool for that kind of crap.

You can’t predict this kind of tragedy, much less avert it, because none of us ever knows what’s going through the minds of anyone else. When you walk past my table at the restaurant, you have no idea if I’m admiring your shoes or wondering where I’ve seen you before or imagining what your intestines would look like spilling out of your abdomen, and if they’d steam.

And fer tit’s sake, there are *always* weird kids on a college campus. A lot of us were that kid at one point or another.

The difference is, we weren’t exceptionally self-absorbed and amoral douchebags. Okay, scratch that, a LOT of us were exceptionally self-absorbed and amoral douchebags. But there was something we had, that this whiny little fart didn’t, that made us, well, not monsters. It wasn’t a balanced brain chemistry, it wasn’t a support system of friends and family, it wasn’t a counselor, it wasn’t anything that can be isolated to keep this kind of shit from going down again. And even I, wise and all knowing as I happen to be, can’t say exactly what it is, but to butcher a quote from a cranky old man, “I know it when I see it’s not there.”

I am very, very glad that Cho Seung Hui is not on my planet any more. It just sucks that he couldn’t have embraced a more traditional martyr fantasy, like public self-immolation or something, instead.

Problem is, everyone is pissing their knickers because they know the next one is still out there. Looking around and finding nothing in the world to love, and everything to hate. Deliberately and methodically channeling all the energy that you and I put into our jobs, our families, our relationships and studies and causes, into creating for themselves a world where you and I are shitrat oppressors who need to be cleansed, and they are the only ones with the balls to do it. Maybe it’s the weird gamer kid who keeps ordering sword sets off of QVC. Maybe it’s the design major who never leaves the studio. Maybe it’s the pre-law Tri-Delt pledge with the collection of Coach bags.

You can’t know. There’s no way in hell. And getting hysterical about people who rely on pharmecutical aid to live normal, happy lives is the media equivalent of banning toenail clippers on airplanes.

PS*I just saw the news about our local kids getting themselves a day off school. Asshats. Next thing you know I’ll be yelling at them to get off my lawn.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Blog Watch, Society, cRAZY aSS pEOPLE.
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