The Business of America

The busybody is a staple of TV mockery. We disdain the nosy neighbor who takes an unhealthy interest in our private business. This is especially true in college, where we go to find our true selves away from the watchful eyes of our parents. Leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone, too. Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech mass murderer, kept to himself while his anger boiled.

In the suite in Harper Hall where he lived with five other students, he was known as a loner, almost a stranger, amid a student body of 26,000. He ate his meals alone in a dining hall. Karan Grewal, 21, another student in the suite of rooms where he lived, recalled that when a candidate for student council visited the suite this year to pass out candy and ask for votes, Cho refused even to make eye contact.

Cho submitted two profoundly violent and profane plays. Ian MacFarlane, a classmate who now works for America Online, posted the plays on the company's Web site Tuesday, saying they had horrified the rest of the students.

"When we read Cho's plays, it was like something out of a nightmare," MacFarlane wrote. "The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn't have even thought of."

As a result of them, MacFarlane added, "we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter.”

Cho was clearly troubled and had been referred to counseling. In hindsight, obviously, a much stronger intervention was needed, but how do we distinguish a Cho Seung-Hui from the hundreds of isolated unhappy kids on every campus in the country? Most students have their own problems and don’t have the energy to solve someone else’s. Besides, nearly everyone is lonely and unhappy at some point when one first leaves home.

In 2001 a concerned South Bay citizen, a Longs’ Drugs clerk, alerted police to disturbing photographs she had finished processing:

Local officials are crediting Kelly Bennett with saving the lives of possibly hundreds of students. Less than 10 hours before [Al] DeGuzman was allegedly going to begin laying out explosives, Bennett found herself staring at freshly developed pictures of a young man in black boots, gloves, and pants, posing with what appeared to be pipe bombs and guns. Police have characterized DeGuzman as an angry individual, brimming with hate, and a fascination with the deadly 1999 Columbine High School massacre. Signs of a troubled teenager emerged this week [February 9, 2001], after police arrested DeGuzman for allegedly assembling the guns and weapons and plotting a massacre.

DeGuzman was arrested, convicted in 2002, and hanged himself in 2004. The warning signs given off by Cho eerily mirror those by DeGuzman, but in Virginia there was no “busybody” like Kelley Bennett to sound the alarm. Knowing when to step in, knowing when to back off, and knowing that we can’t dither too long about the decision is one of the urgent problems of the modern age. © 2007 Stephen Yuen