As has been widely publicized, the Smoking Gun website has acquired a disturbing short play by Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech shooter. It’s not for the faint of heart, and I admit I scanned it quickly, not wanting to linger on the ugly details. It deals with pedophilia, extreme violence, and a boy’s rage at his step-father.
What grabbed me was the language on the final page, where the last stage direction requires the stepfather to kill his stepson. Cho wrote:
Out of sheer desecrated hurt and anger, Richard lifts his large arms and swings a deadly blow at the thirteen year-old boy. Finis.
What jumps out at me is the phrase “sheer desecrated hurt and anger.” Cho was an English major, and his writing was competent, if bizarre. I assume he knew what “desecrated” meant: to violate what is sacred. And at the risk of spending far too much time parsing the words of a madman, I’m struck by what followed: “hurt and anger.” He got them in the right order; as any therapist will tell ya, anger is one emotion that is never primary. It’s a secondary response to fear or hurt, though it often is the first emotion that a wounded person displays.
I posted yesterday (and clearly, controversially) about the potential for anti-Asian backlash in the aftermath of Cho’s deadly rampage. But what is striking me today is the depth of the pain, the depth of the rage, that emerges in Cho’s work. Many men’s rights activists (MRAs) write a great deal about men and anger. (I am in no way implying that your average MRA is a potential mass murderer.) Indeed, much of the discourse about male rage is produced by men who point to feminism as the chief cause of that anger. MRAs often argue that male rage is a product of a legal system slanted against men (particularly husbands and fathers), and a business and political elite whom they see as more interested in protecting and advancing the interests of women than of men. The MRAs often argue that the unreasonable, excessive, and contradictory expectations of women are a source of justifiable male anger.
Obviously, the feminist community is concerned primarily with protecting women from angry, violent men. Debating the roots of male rage is something of a luxury compared to protecting women from rape and assault and murder. But it’s vital that pro-feminist men talk openly about what more we can do to reach young men whose pain and hurt is so extreme that it is dangerously close to erupting into violence.
The rage within Cho Seung-Hui that emerged at others began and ended with a rage against himself. The papers report today that he was hospitalized in 2005; he was considered suicidal. Monday’s rampage ended with Cho taking his own life. His pain and self-loathing were at the heart of what he did. I don’t mean to excuse these awful murders, but I do think that we can balance profound horror at what Cho did on Monday with profound regret that not enough was done to reach him in his isolation and his pain. And we can recognize that there are others like him, overwhelmingly male, who need our immediate and enduring care and attention.
After the Amish shooting in October, I put up this post in which I quoted Pat McGann of Men Can Stop Rape. What he wrote then is worth putting up once more:
I knew that after tragic incidents like those named earlier, the media wants to present the public with answers, and it seemed probable that none of the answers would clearly identify traditional masculinity as a culprit. But I didn’t want to just stay on the surface of manhood; I wanted to burrow underneath to get at its muscle and bone. I wanted to write about how men’s pain gets transformed into men’s anger, because it seemed to me that some deep-seated anguish was underlying all the bullets, the ropes, the knives. We men typically aren’t socialized to handle pain in healthy, constructive ways. Instead we’re taught to “suck it up†and “get over it,†which might be useful strategies some of the time but not as everyday practices – especially when it comes to violence.
In many of the violent incidents I was struck by the number of men who committed suicide. At the end of the Pennsylvania and Colorado school shootings both men shot themselves…. And supposedly the Wisconsin shooting took place because the student had been bullied by students and neither teachers nor the principal would act to stop it. In each of these instances, it seems likely to me that some deep-seated, chronic despondency was present and fueled by anger, the likely source of the violence. I don’t mean to suggest that the root cause of men’s violence is always despair and sadness; everyone can probably clearly point to some examples of brutal acts by men that could be traced back to something other than emotional anguish, but to overlook despondency as a possible cause some of the time misses a revolutionary opportunity.
Yes, revolutionary. I’m making what could be construed as an inflated claim, but I don’t think so: men dealing with their pain in responsible, constructive, and healthy ways would make the world shudder and shake, shifting the foundations of our realities. Once the dust settled, we would be in a better place, a less violent place.
Is encouraging men to talk about their pain an automatic prophylaxis against violence? Probably not. But adult men need to be reaching out to the silent, withdrawn, brooding Cho Seung-Huis of the world. We have to do more to push through the barriers and the walls. We have to find ways — through mentoring, teaching, volunteering — to engage the very sort of young men who look least interested in being engaged by us. Would a quick hug or a teddy bear have prevented this tragedy in Virginia? Of course not. Could a carefully, patiently cultivated relationship, initiated by a mentor who was not dissuaded by an impassive or hostile facade, have perhaps changed the course of Cho Seung-Hui’s life? Yes.
Real men’s work is about reaching young men where they are. Not just the ones who are obviously willing to be reached, either. Real men’s work — especially in school settings — is about initiating relationship with the shy, the bookish, the brooding and the hostile. It is frustrating, difficult, painful, and very tiring work. It is also joyous, especially when the breakthroughs happen. I’ve been working to do this for many years now, with a wide variety of young men. And it may be the most important thing I do.
Sheer desecrated hurt and anger. The hurt emerged two years ago; undealt with, unresolved, it exploded into anger on Monday. The blame lies chiefly with Cho himself; in the end, like any adult, he was more a volunteer than a victim. But along the way, it seems clear that his obvious hurt and pain wasn’t addressed, at least not sufficiently, until it erupted so catastrophically just over 48 hours ago.