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33 Stones

Ah, the 33rd stone has finally hit the front page. It was on the radio today, and the newspaper (a great story in the Richmond Times-Dispatch), and in the blogosphere. I was hoping we wouldn’t have to do this.

You see, in the wake of the massacre at Virginia Tech last week, 32 memorial stones were placed in front of Burruss Hall – one for each person killed. A student named Katelynn Johnson added a 33rd stone – one representing the gunman, VT student Seung-Hui Cho, who ended the killings when he committed suicide. And that 33rd stone is proving controversial – at least, among people who have no apparent connection to Virginia Tech.

For example, Richmond talk-show host Mac Watson likens this 33rd stone to a Hitler shrine at the Holocaust memorial. McQ at QandO likens it to listing and memorializing the 19 hijackers among the victims on 9-11.

I couldn’t disagree more. As I heard a 19-year-old VT student say last week, the stones don't bring anybody back from the dead. They aren't for the dead. They are for those who were left behind - the friends, family, coworkers. Seung-Hui Cho was a sick young man. Yes, he committed a horrible, evil act. But I can’t equate him to Mohamed Atta and Hani Hanjour. It’s just not the same. I find it mind-boggling that McQ thinks it is.

Katelynn Johnson is simply among the people who are able to recognize that Cho will be mourned, as any person should be. His family mourns him, as does some part of the university that feels that they let him down by not being able to intervene on his behalf before it went this far. But it must feel really good to get on the radio or post comments to QandO mocking Ms. Johnson for being a sociology-psychology major – a very substantive argument, folks. Her major.

I’m sure a lot of my friends won’t agree with my point of view on this. But of all the actual VT students I have spoken with since the shootings, none are wasting their youth stewing in hatred. They want to move on. And they do want to understand Cho – “What could make him do something like that?” It’s not a worthless question, and there is more value in remembering him as a sick human being who needed help than in remembering him as a caricature, an animal-demon.

No, I don’t memorialize him. I haven’t read his writings or seen even one second of his movie. But neither do I think that I am better than those people at Virginia Tech who need to better understand him in order to cope with this tragedy. Shame on those of you who do. When Ms. Johnson identified herself in a letter to the editor in the Collegiate Times, the response from the VT community was supportive and positive. Think about that for a minute.

The rest of the world has no business trying to insert themselves into the VT grieving process with your hissy fit over a 33rd stone. The last thing anybody at VT needs right now is your hubris and your bullshit.