Virginia Tech and the Bowl Haircut

Today marks the 10th anniversary of a shooting on the campus of Virginia Tech. The thing is, it was the second incident within five years, and the first incident was at that time most prolific shooting spree on a school campus resulting in the deaths of thirty-two (32) people and the wounding of seventeen others. (Note: there was another shooting near the VT campus involving someone who had escaped police custody, which resulting in VT suspending classes, etc. but the shootings did not occur on the VT campus.)

Facebook shows a history of posts made on that particular day in previous years, and it turned out that because the shooter in the first incident was of Korean descent, I posted a statement to the effect that when news broke out concerning the second shooting, Asian Americans were all sharing the same thought: "Please don't let me be another Asian (shooter)". 

I no longer remembered the context of my post, so I did a little research. This ends the prologue.

The shooter in the VT massacre was named Seung-Hui Cho, who was of South Korean descent. According various accounts, he was diagnosed with depressive disorder, anxiety disorder along with a team I didn't recognize: "selective mutism". Wikipedia defines the term this way:

Selective mutism (SM) is an anxiety disorder in which a person who is otherwise capable of speech becomes unable to speak when exposed to specific situations, specific places, or to specific people, one or multiple of which serving as triggers. This is caused by the freeze response. Selective mutism usually co-exists with social anxiety disorder.^[1] People with selective mutism stay silent even when the consequences of their silence include shame, social ostracism, or punishment.

I broached the idea of having the inability to speak up for one's self taken away and its impact on one's psyche in a blog post: https://samstabbed.blogspot.com/2016/08/a-minority-experience-bowl-haircuts.html  and I contemplate how this might have been magnified by the Korean concept of "Han": https://toisanboy.blogspot.com/2021/07/han.html  and I find myself  feeling sadness imagining how lonely and alone he must have felt while also recalling my own level of unhappiness during my high school and college years. I referenced that in a comment I made to that post ten years ago:

"the thing is, four years ago, i found myself thinking that my circumstances during college weren't all that different in terms of how estranged i felt from everything else at the time - except i preferred to make cutting remarks that left emotional scars. "

I still had my voice as an outlet to express my anger and frustration. Seung-Hui Cho with his selective mutism didn't even have that. And even though he received "treatment" for his diagnosed condition until his junior year of high school, it clearly wasn't enough.